Demented mom

My first half marathon wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I finished in 2 hours which was pretty good considering I hadn't run more than 6 miles in 2 months; must have been the giant bowl of pasta I had the night before. Running a marathon is like the lie that you are pregnant for 9 months; they tell you its 26 or 13 but its really 26.2 and 13.1. My gps said is was 13.6!!! I can't say that I would have done this without my friend Jacquie's encouragement. We both have had our training challenges but we got out there and put one foot in front of the other. There were a lot of reasons why i couldn't do this. It felt really good to set a goal and meet it despite the fact that everything that could have gone wrong in training DID go wrong.  As you can see Jacqui is the stylish one.  

I met most of my goals, all of which involved some version of me not embarassing myself by sleeping through/tripping/puking/crapping/peeing or any kind of miscelleous bodily malfunctioning during the race.  I almost hurled but not for the reasons you would expect. You see my first half marathon was in the Dirty Woo. Ran through every kind of neighborhood and was very disracted the whole time, checking out all the houses in the nice neighborhoods and counting the number of check cashing stores in the bad.  The vomiting almost happened when I ran by a hugely unattractive guy in his bathrobe leaning against his front door smoking a butt. I also discovered that there are a LOT of hair braiding salons on Chandler St. FYI at races they aren't always hand out water - sometimes its gatorade and you should doublecheck before you decide it would be refreshing to douse yourself in it.  For some reason the whole first part of the race I thought about my stepfather who lived through unspeakable cancer pain (nothing compared to the pain of dragging my fat ass around town): between this and my trying to remember where he worked on chandler st I blew through a couple miles of mindlessness. Strangely I was competitive during the race even though my only goal was to finish. Almost every section I ran in focused on catching someone I couldn't bear losing to (I usually try not to end a sentence with a preposition but FUCK it I'm tired). I got a lot of satisfaction from blowing by the 90 year old man, the hippie wearing blue tights and the cottage cheese leg girl. As usual I saw lot of hilariously stupid things to amuse myself with. The race shuts down all the streets it goes through and its not the first year for you race so you would think people who live on the route would be used to it but I saw a guy in the "rich" part of town trying to get out of his driveway and he couldn't because it was wall to wall people so he was busy cursing moving his car a millimeter at a time; I have my anger management issues but its actually comical watching someone that idotically mad. Then this runner took matters into her own hands and started yelling CAR!! CAR!! as he tried to get down his street. Of course I laughed and stayed exactly where I was. PURE EVIL I TELL YOU. 

As if I don't have enough gear for everything I do I also discovered the compression (insert product: socks, pants, etc). Yes please!! Supposed to prevent shin splints, decrease muscle cramps and soreness!! Sign me up!!!


Does it make me a bad person that I wanted to toast my succcess with a refreshing minty newport light?