Papa John's 10 Miler

I've been wanting to blog about this for a few days now, but my laptop is being repaired (long story) and Ben is usually on his computer, so I have resorted to blogging at work during my lunch break. Anyway...the Papa John's 10 miler was Saturday, and Jenn and I survived! I took our traditional "before" picture:

The weather was decent at first, cool but not cold...but as soon as we started the race we realized the weather was turning fast. We were running into the wind the first 3 miles and then the next 2 miles it rained (but we were in Iroquios Park, so the trees helped block a lot of that). The hills in the park were brutal...like scaling a mountain in the middle of the race, at least to me! We had to walk a little bit to recover after the hills, but ran as much as possible. We also had to stop for a bathroom break, which added almost 5 minutes to our time, according to my watch. The last 4 miles were tough for me after that...lost that momentum you get after a few miles, so it felt like starting all over, except exhausted. The last mile was also like an eternity, but Jenn still managed to have a burst of energy at the end and sprint ahead and beat me by 41 seconds. Maybe I should have left her at the bathrooms...just kidding! :)

Mere minutes after finishing and going into the stadium where it ended to get some free Papa John's pizza, there came a torrential downpour and terrible winds, and it felt like the temperature dropped...so we were so thankful that we were finished!! There were a lot of people still out there...they got soaked! We had to wait until the wind and rain stopped before going back to the car, which was at least half a mile away, and we were freezing by the time we got there.

And of course, our traditional "after" pictures (we even look cold!):

Jason did awesome- finished in 1:31:22!

Here are my official results:

Time: 2:11:55
Overall Rank: 5,585 out of 6,927
Gender Rank: 2,662 out of 3,713
Division Rank (Females 20-24): 250 out of 287

Wow...I only beat out 37 females 20-24...oh well, to be expected. I am definitely motivated to train harder for the mini-marathon in 3 weeks because I did not feel like I could have gone 3.2 more miles at the end of this race!