"Rising up to the challenge of our rivals..."

I would like to say that I trained well for my race on Saturday. I would like to say that I ran at all during the two weeks leading up to the race. I sure would like to say that. 

But in spite of my foolishness in training, I survived and it was a great day to race. It would have been foolish of me not to run as fast as I could, given that it was 33 degrees and I was wearing shorts. 

We were thrilled to wake up at 5AM to get to the race. See?

We had some trouble finding the race start line (and the town the race happened to be in- who would have thought that West Virginia would nullify all of our GPS devices?) but got there and got our race numbers with half an hour to spare.

Kelsey used this time to get a coffee. Alex was making silly gestures of some sort.

The night before the race, I made a playlist, removed all the titles from the songs, and e-mailed it to Kelly, Alex, and Kels to load onto their ipods. At exactly 3 minutes before the race started, everyone pressed play. In this way, we would all be listening to the same music together no matter where we were on the course. The playlist was filled with epic songs that had to do something with either running or fitness. You know: Eye of the Tiger, Chariots of Fire, Born to Run... that kind of stuff. I even threw on Neverending Story near the end, just in case someone had to take more than an hour to finish the 10k. 

The course itself started in West Virginia and then went over a bridge into Maryland, up and down the C&O Canal. I was feeling really good about things until I started seeing markers in places. At the top of the marker it would say "10k" and underneath that it would say "3" or "4." Since I was running and cold, I did not really have time to process this other than figuring that the "3" meant 3 kilometers. This was extremely disheartening, as I passed marker "4" at 30 minutes and I had really wanted to run the 10k in under an hour. Later, I would find that these numbers were actually mile indicators and I was much closer than I thought.

The final challenge of the course was running back up a hill and across the bridge in order to get to the stadium in the center of the town. The hill was not pleasant and I slowed down considerably. Still, I pushed on and managed to not walk the entire race. As I ran into the stadium they announced my name (I was in a pack of one) and I crossed the finish line almost 48 minutes after I started.

Personal record! (of course, no matter what my time was I was going to get a personal record, since this was my first race.)

Alex beat me by about a minute, and Kelly and Kels showed up a few minutes later. Then the race organizers gave us free pizza and beer, because what we really wanted at 10AM after running 6.2 miles was a beer.

Kelsey got a Bud Light. She says it was because she prefers Bud Light. The rest of us feel it is because there was no one getting Bud Light and the Bud Light man looked sad.

The post-race party was at a very swanky Bavarian-themed hotel.

Upon getting back to DC, we were hungry again so we went to get more pizza.

We chose to make our own at H and Pizza. It was a solid choice.