A Dose of the Warm Fuzzies: My 25+ Mile Weekend!

This weekend was completely exhausting and awesome. Starting out, last Thursday night I had a formal Navy dinner to attend. Who has events on a Thursday night??? So Ryan took the ferry over and we got all spiffed up and went to the dinner. It was actually a pretty good time if I wasn't watching the clock the whole time thinking about how late it was going to be by the time we made it all the way back to Seattle! One of the Navy traditions for these events is the 'grog', a mixture of liqours served out of a toilet bowl (unused). Everytime you commit a violation or get called out by the Captain, you have to go up and drink from it. This is another reason these things are normally not on a Thursday night...people like to take full advantage of it. It was a good time but a late night and it got me phsyched up for all the rest of the upcoming festivities!

Friday evening Kimberly and I picked up Jason from the airport and Ryan from work and headed back to the house for the night. We walked around Queen Anne a little bit and got some supper and got ready for our big weekend. Saturday morning I had to get up bright and early. Ryan dropped me off in Seattle Center around 6:30am for the start of my half marathon. The race started at 7am. The night before it had been pouring rain so I was crossing my fingers that it would hold off for our run. It turned out great and it looks like my ankle is pretty well recovered. Once I got running it wasn't cold at all and no rain. All the rain for the day before made it super humid though, I could feel the thickness of the air as I ran through it. I started off with a pretty quick pace, but around mile 8 I started slowing down big time. It's never that I don't have the endurance for the run, but my muscles start giving out after a while. I'm really hoping that starting up with Crossfit next month will build some strong muscles and increase my speed overall. I can't wait to see how it helps my times! This race had some serious hills in it too. Right after I crossed the 10k point, I turned the corner to be faced with a huge hill which almost took my breath away looking at it. I just had to put my head down and power up it with the help of a little BSB playing on my iPhone. Even though my pace slowed down a lot in the last few miles, I ended up with by far my fastest time yet! I ended up crossing the finish line with a time of 1 hour 48 minutes and 7 second. That's an average pace of 8:15 per mile. Out of 9470 females, I finished 265th, so I beat 9205 of them! I felt pretty good about my time and again I think I owe a lot of it to my iron supplements! I can't wait to see if I can beat that time with a little crossfit work! (Other random fact...the guy who won the half marathon was from Rochester Hills, MI and the second place female was too...crazy!)

Kimberly and Ryan met me at the finish line and we walked around for a bit getting some goodies and my checked bag and taking pics before walking back home. I've discovered that I really need to walk at least a couple miles after my run to really cool off while drinking water and eating some food so I don't get sick from exhaustion. The walk home was a perfect amount of a cool down, and I got to show Kimberly a little more of our neighborhood! When we got home, Ryan headed out to Crossfit and the rest of us started cleaning up, packing up, and getting ready for our next adventure! We headed out a little afternoon for Whistler. It was an extra long drive with a lot of backed up traffic, but we made it up there just in time to check into our room and head into the village for supper. The place was packed with people who had done the Tough Mudder on Saturday. They have 2 days worth of heats for the event and we had to do one on Sunday since I was running the half marathon on Saturday.

Sunday morning we got up bright and early to head over to the Olympic Park for the event. It's not timed at all, so I can't really call it a race, it's an event to finish. On the way over to the park we nearly ran over a bear that was crossing the street. Only in Canada. On the way back from the Event, we saw two more bears hanging out on the side of the road. That brings my wild bear sightings up to 4 for the year! Anyway, back to the Event. It turned out to be a really good thing we ran it on Sunday. There were a lot less people there, so there wasn't a wait for any of the obstacles which meant we could finish it all a lot faster. It had also been pouring rain on Saturday and although it was pretty chilly on Sunday, at least it was mostly sunny. It was almost 8:30 by the time our group of about 200 people got started. They did a little motivational intro at the beginning and since the event benefits the Wounded Warrior charity, they had all the millitary members stand up, so I got to be recognized ;) Then we (Jason, Ryan, and I) were off. Unfortunately due to a broken finger, Kimberly wasn't able to join us in the run :( so she was on cheering and picture taking duty! It started up with running up the mountain on a rocky path. Since the course was 12 miles long, there was a lot of just running on the mountain paths. Then we came across the obstacles. One of the first ones was that you had to jump into a dumpster full of ice water (as in water with buckets of ice in it). Then as if that wasn't bad enough you had to swim under a board which made you fully immerse yourself under the ice water, then climb out. Since we were so far north, when you got out, it was still freezing cold. I think the temps were in the high 40s, maybe low 50s, so now we were soaked with ice water and running in the cold. There were several other obstacle including crawling through mud, running through mud, carrying wood stumps up a path, jumping over and crawling under logs, climbing over (with assistance from team mates) 15ft walls, sliding down a chute of snow into an alpine lake, and several other things. Through all the running portions, we were running up and down the mountain over rocks, mud, and snow, so it wasn't an easy run at all. About 3 hours later we came upon the finish line where we had to run through a bunch of hanging cords with electrical charges running through them to the finish line! At the finish line we were handed our t-shirts and complimentary beer. We met up with Kimberly, who was a champ chasing us around from obstacle to obstacle getting as many pictures as she could, and headed back to the hotel for some hot showers to get all the cold and mud off of us! We hung out in the village for lunch then hit the road again back to Seattle. Again there was a ton a traffic so we didn't get home nearly as soon as we had hoped. Unfortunately Jason had to head right to the airport to catch a red eye back to Houston so he could be at a meeting in the morning and Kimberly had to get up super early to catch a morning flight back to SF and head right into work. If was super fun weekend and I'm so glad Kimberly and Jason could join us for it. Now I'm super sore and have some pretty good battle scars to heal before hitting up the beach next week! Let the good times continue!