Salt Lake City Half Marathon

 What a day! This was such a fun challenge and awesome accomplishment for me. The day started at 4:30 up in Salt lake, I stayed with my sister Katie. We drank some nasty vitamin protein shake cocktail and ate some protein energy bars, took some Alieve and headed out for the race! If you've never been to a big race starting line before the energy is incredible. Same goes for the finish line. Everyone is anxiously waiting to start, stretching and drinking water, and the loud techno music is blaring to pump everyone up. Then you line up and the gun goes off! My mom was walking and my sister runs faster then me so I ran alone. I was SHOCKED at the amount of energy I had. I blame it on the nutrition changes for this run. More calories and more liquids. I ran 6 miles before I stopped to walk and that was just because I had to pee. Then I ran the rest of the way, only stopping to drink. I kept saying to myself "okay, I'm going to walk after this hill... and then after the hill I felt awesome so I kept running....and then kept running. It was so fun! When I crossed the finish line I was amazed at my time....I finished in 2 hours 10 min! Thats averaging 9 min miles! I was pumped! To say the least! And that not my official chip time, thats the clock time, so knock a few minutes off that and thats my real time. They haven't posted the chip times yet so I'm anxious to see. I actually beat my sister who said before the race "You are a mom with 3 kids, there's no way you are going to beat me." Oh really? There's nothing like crossing the finish line of a race. It is an amazing feeling. I totally cried, partly out of pure exhaustion and partly out of the emotion that comes with finishing something really hard. Mike and the kids came to the finish but I wasn't expecting to finish til later so they missed me by a few minutes, hence no pictures of me crossing the finish line

:( sad. Oh well. I was just happy they came to support me. The rest of the day has been filled with limping around, a massage, more limping around, and then dinner at Rodezios. Now I'm going to bed because I'm exhausted. Oh and props to my dad for running his 17th marathon. You're old but you rock! Here are some pic from after the race

 Yes, this is a pic someone took me wiping tears right after I finished, I thought it was a pretty genuine portrail of how I was feeling.

 And this is my ear warmer, it says "wanna race?"
And over here -----> is me looking pretty exhausted. HOT!!