The Races

Unfortunately I only saw Dan at the end of the race, when I was looking as tired as I was feeling.

The past two weekends I have run in races. Two weekends ago was a local 10k race at Elings Park in Santa Barbara. My friend Cameron from my mom's group told me about it, and like the sucker that I am, I agreed. It was "only" six miles, but out of those six miles I think less than .5 miles were flat. The rest of it was so-steep-you-were-practically-falling downhill or so-steep-you-could-barely-get-up-it-uphill. Since all of my training has been done on the perfectly flat bike trail, this course was pretty grueling for me. The good news was - I WON! Yep, no kidding. I got a $50 gift card to a spa, a winners hat, and a winners mug. Before you are too impressed, I might mention that there were only 3 women in my race. I thought that there were 4, but it turned out that one of them was someone from the 5k race who had gotten lost in the hills and was a little late coming back. But at my age and post-babiness, I'll take what I can get!


Yesterday, I ran in the long anticipated 1/2 marathon in Carlsbad, CA. My parents have a little place in Oceanside which was only a few minutes from the race, so we drove down on Friday and stayed with them. After all the rain I was glad that the sun came out for the big race! I ran pretty well. Definitely didn't win, but I was pretty proud of my 52nd place in my age group (out of 832 30-34 year old women!). Peruse the results here. The course was really beautiful, it went along the beach for most of the way so me and my 10000 co-runners had a great view. I had several friends running with me:

My high school friend Kimber, whose idea this was. Kimber and I ran together for the first several miles. We both had a blast and are talking about doing another one!

My coworker/dear friend Alicia, whom, until yesterday, would tell people she was "not a runner" (Alicia beat her goal by 12 minutes!)

My coworker/dear friend Liz, who is a REAL runner, and ran the full marathon like a gazelle. Liz's boyfriend Andy and her had come out from the UP (that's upper peninsula for those of you who don't speak Michigonian) for a marathon/surf vacation. Unfortunately the water was too cruddy for any surfing so they cut their trip short. Not to short, though, to prevent Andy from proposing to Liz the night of the marathon! (I have absolutely no liberty to announce that, but I figure my blog readers probably aren't mixing with the UP social circles).

I was also joined by people who didn't run: my parents, who made an amazing pre-race dinner for the AREVA girls and braved the bus ride to bring Nory to the end of the race to cheer for me.

My darling husband, without whom I could not have done this (and without whom I could not do at all)

And my ace cheerleader.

The whole thing was quite fun. It was great to see so many friends, and I feel like I accomplished my goal of getting my baby-butt back into shape.