Mini Marathon May 3 2008

Before the Race....at 6 in the morning!!!

After the Race

Some of the Girls in our Ward that ran the race

So we survived the mini marathon! After all our praying Lance was not only able to do the race, but his ankle didn't hurt at all and we were able to run together the entire time. And we had a blast! This was one of the most exhilarating experiences of our lives. The Indy Half Marathon is one of the biggest in the nation and there were about 35,000 participants. There were at least 10 people from our ward participating so the night before the race we got together for a little Pasta Dinner and then all tried to get to bed at a decent hour so we could wake at 4 the next morning. We all carpooled down to Indianapolis, and the whole race is extremely well organized so it was really easy to get where we needed to be. It was also lot of fun because they have about 125 bands set up along the sides of the raceway playing music and people line the streets almost the entire time. Lance and I were grateful for all the hours we put in training for this race because we felt pretty good most of the time. At the 6 mile mark we started running on the Indy 500 raceway which covers the next 3 miles of the race and this was probably the funnest part for us because they had great music playing and you could hear it really well. Lance started singing (out loud) to every song that came on and, I kept looking at him thinking how does he have the energy to sing right now?! Although it did entertain me. The 11 mile mark is where we really started to hit the wall. Lance kept saying "I think we should sprint the last mile" and I just told him "I think if I break my pace now, I will just crash" When we had about a 1/4 of a mile left though, and I could see the finish line, I decided I could do it and I started picking up my pace a little bit, well this was about the point that Lance's ankle started REALLY hurting for the first time that day and we decided to just stay on pace as we crossed the finish line. Our goal was to finish the race in under 2 1/2 hours and we finished in under 2 hours 10 minutes. Our offical times ended up being Kathleen: 2:09:05 Lance: 2:09:06. I thought it would be just a LITTLE bit fun if I made sure my foot hit the mat JUST before Lance's to see if I would techincally "beat" him, and I did! He says "I didn't know we were competing!". We were pretty proud of ourselves because we reached our goal of not walking once during the race, and we kept our pace at mile pace a 9 minutes 52 seconds the entire time.