Provo River Half Marathon 2010

I ran the Provo River Half Marathon this weekend. I decided to do it pretty much last minute and called my long time BFF, Robyn, to see if she wanted to give it a go with me. She's only been running since May and never that far, but she is either insane or very daring and said, "Why not?"



Getting Ready To Go

Lily ran it also. She rode in the same car with us up and back. We had some good laughs. She rocked it coming in at 5th place. She ran it so fast and still ran back to run with us through the finish.


Robyn and I back at the house after it was over. We were a little silly from lack of sleep, I think.

So here is a picture of us when we had showered and looked decent again.

About the race:

First off, it was so beautiful. Secondly, it was the most disorganized mess at the start. Our bus driver was just out for a morning drive in the toolies and had no idea where he was going. He managed to get us lost a couple times and had to do 20 point turn arounds to get out of some spots. No one could find the starting line. They started about 40 minutes late. Another bus ran over traffic signs without even caring. Good thing they weren't some poor racers standing there. Lily, Rob, and I almost got our feet ran over by a big white bus. He backed us up against a fence with nowhere to go. It was exciting there for a minute or two.
Finally, after 2 hours of standing around, the race started and Lily was OFFFFF like a gazelle. It was quite a steep downhill for the first 3 miles and we were getting passed right and left like crazy, but we held the pace that we wanted. At mile 6, there was a ginormous (sp?) hill that was a mile long. It was our strong point. It hurt and was hard, but we passed a lot of the people who had passed us and no one passed us on that hill, we never slowed down. It was awesome. I won't drag it all out play by play, but also at mile 12ish, Robyn was done. She was miserable and I asked her what was hurting her the most and she snapped, "Your voice!" Haha, I thought I had been talking to keep her mind off the pain and was being such a good encouraging friend. I had been asking her about her dogs and saying how pretty the birds sounded and basically, anything I could think of. Evidently, it was not helping. With about a quarter mile left to go, I saw Lily waiting on the sides to run through the finish with us. It helped boost us up to finish strong.
Our overall time: 1:55
Average pace per mile: 8:46
I was so happy to be under the 2 hour mark and Robyn thought she would be doing 10:00 minute miles so she really came in faster than she expected. We were pretty happy with it.
I can't wait to try it again. Harder and faster!!!