"Race-y Mommas"

For most of you that know me, you know that I am not a natural athlete, I'm not even much of an unnatural one! That being said, I started running a few months after Rebecca was born (a story for another time) and on Sunday (2/14) my dear friends Christal and Katie and I finished the Austin Half Marathon! We were quite proud of ourselves (especially Christal, who ran 21 weeks preggers)!

Here are some photos in reverse order.

Here we are post-race. Our hubbies brought all the kiddos to the finish line--they made such a sweet cheering section. Owen's "Go Momma Go" sign was taped to a tennis racket and Nathan's sign for Christal was taped to a grille spatula (way to improvise Dads!).
Here we are actually crossing the finish line. We finished in 2 hours 42 minutes, which is pretty consistent with the 11 mile/hour pace we kept while training. Be clear: our goal was to finish strong, not finish fast! (We finished a few minutes after the guy who WON the FULL marathon--that's insane!)

My mom cheered us on at 2 locations (she got a workout that morning too)! Her sign made us smile, as well as a lot of the other runners! She even managed to get my brother Alex out of bed to encourage us on his day off. Apparently his little pug Ollie was quite the hit!
Here we are at about 6:40 right before the race started.
It really was a great experience. Minus two particularly challenging hills, it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared (a testimony to actually finishing a training plan). It was fun to see parts of Austin from that vantage point, and to run with such an incredible crowd (over 15,000 people). Even though we weren't doing a whole lot of talking, there was an incredible sense of camaraderie amongst all the runners and all the people gathered to cheer us on. We took encouragement from all the signs people made even though they weren't for us. AND we definitely feel like we accomplished something. Perhaps an annual tradition???