1/2 Marathon- Done!!!

On Sunday Shane and I completed Boston's Run to Remember a 1/2 marathon honoring Massachusetts Law Enforcement Officers killed in the line of duty. Proceeds from the marathon are donated to kids at risk across the city of Boston. This was my first ever official race, or run of any kind. When Shane suggested it in the dead of winter I was pretty skeptical. Picture yourself training for a 1/2 marathon when it's only 30 degrees outside... not something you really want to do with your Sunday morning... But, we did it. We were lucky enough to train at the gym until it was actually warm enough to go outside. And last weekend I made the mistake of mis-reading our running map and forced us to run 12.6 miles when we were only supposed to run 10 miles... opps! I wasn't sure I was going to live it down. Mostly because I SWORE that we had only run 9 miles and it took 2 hours and 10 minutes, which meant we were running WAY slower than we had been running. But... to my dismay, we came home to realize we had run almost the full length of a 1/2 marathon and did it at about a 10 minute mile pace. So, Sunday we woke up early, after barely sleeping- I think at 1am I jumped out of bed thinking we were late for the race and proceeded to wake up every hour on the hour after that. OOO the nerves!!! But we got up, got some breakfast, did some stretching, etc and headed down to the parking lots near the race. We got there in plenty of time, and started to take in the energy of all the runners. If you have never run a race, even a 5k , I really recommend it. There is something really exciting about being in a group of people all set on one goal. We managed to finish in 2:03:39. I was VERY happy with the results and could not have done it without Shane's support. He is an amazingly supportive running partner. I know he could have run much faster than that, but I wouldn't have been able to finish without him. Huge thanks to Mom and Vincent for being there at the finish line cheering us on and grabbing this action shot.