Top of Utah 1/2 Marathon 2012

Leading up to this race I was SUPER nervous.  The fact that I was pacing it and not just doing it for myself scared my pants right off of me!  I wanted to make sure that I did everything in my power to have a good run.  On Friday, I went to Jorge's House of Pain for a not so sensual maaasage and then Holly and I did P90X Stretch.  My legs felt all loosey and nice, I then wore my compression sleeves for the most part of the day.  Because I didn't want to be accused of wearing soccer socks at Costa Vida I left them behind.

We arrived at Granny and Papa's house (Jake's grandparents) in Logan and chatted with them for a while.  I love these people, they are a crack up!  We looked at old scrapbooks of when Jake's grandpa was a Fighter Pilot back in the olden days ;)  It was neat to see a lot of the things that he had accomplished.  We also stumbled upon a picture of me when I was prego with Kobe...heaven help me, I was HUGE!!

Before I went to bed I slathered my legs in MaxFreeze and put on my compression socks.  Jake was kind enough to drive us to the buses at 4:50 a.m.  We looked for our "pace master" for about 15 minutes and finally gave up and jumped on a bus.  Luckily, Holly brought her blanket (which I thought was a snuggie) so we were able to keep a little warm.  It was quite cold up the canyon.

Finally, about 10 minutes before the race started we (Holly and I paced this together) saw our "pace master" and  received our fancy schmancy singlet's and pace bands.  We were all set and nervous as can be!  We decided pretty quickly that I would be in charge of keeping us on pace and Holly would be in charge of the pacer sign.  Every time Holly went to look at her watch she nearly whacked me with her stick :D  That and my OCD and pacing went along quite nicely together.  The constant worrying about keeping us on pace helped the time fly by.  All of a sudden we were at mile 7...how in the world did that happen?!?  We had a few guys we were pacing and chatting with.  It was fun to hear about them and some of their past running experiences.  At about mile 11 or 12 we lost our guys, there was a hill and they fell behind.  We picked up a couple of others at this point.

We had to slow down a little there at the end, as to not finish ahead of schedule.  We had to tell a few people to go ahead and finish strong!.  We finished in 1:40:08!  I would say we did pretty dang awesome for our first pacing gig!

There we are hard at work.  Me checking the clock and Holly checking her watch! 

I absolutely LOVED pacing and I can not wait to do it again!!!  I felt awesome the whole run.  It was a comfortable pace but it was a good workout.  It wasn't so slow that I felt like I wasn't getting a workout.  YAY for pacing!!

After we finished it was off to watch a few friends finish a Half Ironman!   It was so amazing to watch these people.  We were there early and were able to see the first finishers.  I am so glad that we made it in time to see our friend transition from the bike to the run.  I WILL learn to swim...mark my words, I will learn to swim.  I want to do not only a half but a full Ironman.  Now that I've put it on the blog I have to do it, right?!?  If anyone wants to give me swimming lessons for free I will let you ;)