It's only been a week, but it seems like it was forever ago when I had an awesome weekend with my 3 good friends in Austin. We were there to run the ZOOMA Womens-only half-marathon, which we had been trainig for since before Christmas. We'd run on our own during the week, and then every Saturday we'd get up early (or in-between soccer games) to do our long runs together. Of the 4 of us, I was the only one who hadn't run a half-marathon yet - but now I can check that one off!
Here we are the morning of the race! The race was hosted by the Hyatt Lost Pines Resort, which is where we stayed for 2 nights. We just had to walk out to the parking lot to the starting line. We were all a little jittery - excited to race, but nervous about things going wrong.
But we were mostly nervous because of this:
This is the elevation change of the course. We had heard there were hills (of course, we're in Texas "hill country") But when we got to the hotel and drove the course, we all screamed in unison at the size and steepness of some of these hills. Seriously, Jenny had to downshift just to drive up them!! Some runners would walk the hills, some would run halfway up, and others, like myself, jogged to the top, then stopped for water to recover.
Here's a couple photos I swiped from the race website. Judging by the look, I'm probably approaching another hill
I had goal to finish the race in 2 hours, but after seeing the hills my new goal was 2:15. Somehow I did it. I finished in 1:58, which is about a 9 minute mile. I was 93rd out of over 1000 runners. I was proud. Everything was going well for me, I was excited to be a part of this great event, I was loaded with caffeine from my
shot-block fruit chews, and I had just downloaded new music on the iPod that gave me an extra boost. Another thing that really helped was that they had pace-runners, who ran the race with a sign that posted their finishing time. The whole time I stayed pretty close to the runner with the 2:00 sign.
The great part of the race was that it was over before 10 am! So we spent the rest of the day here:
The hotel had a fabulous water park, with a couple of pools and a lazy river, and lots of exhausted runners. We floated that river no fewer than 3 times.
The rest of the weekend was spent shopping, eating (seriously, we got desserts everywhere we went, and justified it as "carb-loading"), and laughing. Non-stop laughing.
Thanks for a great weekend girls! I need something like this probably once a month :)
Scarlett amazingly loved the whole show! The only time she tried to leave her seat was during intermission. I was worried because the show was late-afternoon, during naptime, but she hung in there! I knew she was tired though, because as we were leaving the stadium she kept doing this: 
