Baltimore Half Marathon

WOOHOO! WE DID IT!

So we started the training with 6 in our team but unfortunately lost a few along the way ... injury, babysitting issues, and a wonderfully unexpected pregnancy. At the last minute, we were able to get a substitute for one of the team members, so 4 of us run together - Rebecca, myself, Jim, and Brenda. Now Rebecca is insane, she ran the St. George marathon the previous weekend and was crazy enough to take on Baltimore with us at the last minute. She helped me keep my pace goal.

There were a lot of people there, 14,000 in the races alone. The half-marathoners joined the full marathoners at mile 3 for us, mile 16 for them, this was for us to all finish together.

(See if you can pick us out of the crowd in the left and right pictures.)

For Brenda and I, our ultimate goal was to finish in 2:20, but ideal goal was 2:30. The marathon is apparently considered a very difficult run amongst the runner's world as most of the route is up long, steep hills. The downhill is almost unnoticeable. I felt bad for the full marathoners as the difficult uphills were the last 13.1 miles (which was our run). We were quite pleased to have finished at 2:20 (Brenda) and 2:21 (me and Rebecca), Jim finished in 2:06.

It turned out to be a perfect day - 60-70 degrees and a slight breeze! At about 11 miles I wanted to die, but kept going. I ran the entire time! I even surprised Rebecca when I sprinted to the finish line for the last 1/4 mile.

Mike got some great pictures of our start, but unfortunately missed us coming through the finish line. That's OK, I so appreciate him driving us there at 6:30am, carrying all of our stuff, and hanging around for several hours waiting even though he was very sick. Yeah, he's pretty awesome!