WE DID IT!!

This past Saturday, a girl friend and I set out to do the impossible... well, what seemed impossible for us at least!! Let me start from the beginning...

About 4-5 months ago at the neighborhood Bunco (yeah, I'm such a mom now!) over margaritas and cheese dip probably, one of the girls in the group mentioned training to walk or run the "Mini Marathon" (which is what us locals call the half-marathon that takes place every year about a week before the Kentucky Derby!) Of course, in my buzzed and stuffed state, I immediately declined the idea and went about my business.

Upon returning from our trip to see family in New York in January - 5 pounds heavier and not happy - I approached this girl to see if she was still interested in training for this hell-fest. She said yes ... yea!

Our training was HARD CORE and strenuous to say the least! It consisted of walking on Monday nights from about 8:00pm to 8:40pm (and then talking in the street for about 15 minutes) and then going home! As if this doesn't seem CRAZY enough, we also added a Thursday night walk in March (when we didn't have to wear 10 layers of clothing, gloves, ear muffs, etc...) which we probably ACTUALLY ended up doing 4-5 times since we are both so busy. So, obviously, we were not taking this lightly ... we were hard-core, going for the gold, training for this Mini!

(pause for those who are just now figuring out that I'm being sarcastic... I'm a lazy ass, you know I didn't really train for this thing!!)

On the morning of, dear dear Jamie offers to take us to the starting line so we don't have to take the shuttle and we could show up like 5 minutes before the race started (again, we are so professional!!) - this also allowed us about an extra hour of sleep!!

We heard the starting bell (no gun shot ... it's kind of a bad part of town, so I guess that would be in bad form) and literally 10 minutes later, we were actually able to start walking! I felt like we should take off running or something, but we paced ourselves beautifully (with help of our awesome heart rate monitors!) and with the motivation that the next "water stop" might have some left over Sport Jelly Beans left over from the so-called "elite runners" (which they did around mile 7!!) WE MADE IT THROUGH!!

One walk-through-the-park, Port-a-Potty stop, stroll-down-Southern-Parkway, loop-through-Churchill Downs, bee-line-to-downtown, and a swift jog over the finish line later and we had accomplished our goal of finishing in less than 3:30!!

Although we were both hurting pretty bad (although not so bad after the free Sun Chips and Michelob Ultras we got afterward!) we were impressed with ourselves and our strong finish! On our athletic high, we vowed to compete in future 5K runs and hopefully walk/jog the Mini next year!!

There is no telling what we can do if we ACTUALLY train for events in the future!! haha!

UPDATE!!!

Try this link to see pics of us running! Hopefully it will work!http://www.brightroom.com/view_user_event.asp?EVENTID=46571&BIB=13355&PWD=