39.3 miles of fun! (Part 1)

OK, OK, here's the update: Two races, two Sundays, 39.3 miles of fun!

November was an action packed month of racing for this girl. I already told you about the Greater Gator Duathlon, the sunday before Thanksgiving I ran in the Women's Half Marathon in St. Pete, FL.

Billy and I headed to St. Pete on Saturday and headed to the Renaissance Vinoy Hotel and the Half Marathon Expo to pick up my packet and my goodie bag. The cool thing about this race is that they always give out the coolest goodie bags. They are reusable shopping totes designed by Jackie Mcfee. (www.jackiemcfee.com) She has a whole collection of items designed for her daughter Kendall. Cute stuff!

After checking out the expo we headed to the hotel before heading out for dinner. I found an Italian restaurant nearby and we weren't the only ones carb loading in that place. Every other table had runners loading up on pasta. I had angel hair pasta with broccoli and garlic olive oil sauce. It was delicious and apparently I was really hungry because I ate the WHOLE pile of noodles!

After supper it was back to the hotel and this girl crashed. Race start was 0700 and we had to head over around 0615 to make sure we could find parking. I'll admit, I hadn't really thought much about the race over the last week. I didn't want to psyche myself out, but I've been working with Kellie, my trainer, and I felt really strong. I figured that I would probably be able to finish in about two hours or two and a quarter.

As I made my way to the start line, I began to feel the butterflies, but I told myself, "Just go out and have fun!" They had me in the 3rd corral, so I was about halfway between the fast runners and the walkers. The gun goes off and five thousand women and about fifty guys take off. I felt really strong out of the gate and found myself passing people left and right! My 5K split time was 30 minutes! (That's pretty fast for me)

Another cool thing about this race is that we get to run through Tropicana field. This is about mile 12. I had it in my head that last years time for this same race was around 2:30, so I was pretty skeeved when I was heading through the parking lot into the Trop at 2:00 and I figured that I would never make it in the 2:15 that I wanted. After I exited the Trop and got out of the parking lot, I was determined to finish strong, so I just stepped up my pace. It also helped that the last mile of the route is all downhill. I crossed the finish line and stopped my stopwatch at 2:26. I almost started crying! I can't believe after all that hard work in the gym I only beat last year's time by 4 minutes!

The weather was hot for this race too, so here it is a week before Thanksgiving and its 80 degrees outside and I am tired and hot and just want to get back to the hotel so I can take a shower and head home.

We get back to the hotel and I pull up the results for last year: my time was 2:43:18!! I beat last year's time by 17 minutes!! YeeHaw!!