Phoenix half marathon.

I trained for and ran in my first half marathon on March 2nd. When I heard about the Phoenix Marathon I knew it was my chance, it was the only Saturday marathon that I'd ever known of. I've always put it a race on the back burner in focusing all my efforts on fertility. But, we were finished with our final treatment, I decided to sign up. The timing of the race was perfect, the weather for training was perfect, and the course was flat and perfect too. One of my friends, Tenneal, was also running it and she had run several races so I wanted to stay with her. I told her from the beginning that I didn't care about the finish time, as long as it was under 2 hours. Thinking that was a perfectly generous goal, I was surprised when she said otherwise. We drove to the race together at 4 am, and stayed together for the first couple miles when I asked where the 2 hour pacer was. She said he was way ahead, so I tried my best to catch up to him and we said our goodbyes. I saw lots of friends and my cousin along the way and finally caught up to the 2 hour pacer. I ran ahead of him and then when I was pretty far ahead, I focused on my running. I couldn't help thinking how grateful I was to be running and for a healthy body. I thought about the day I first tried to be a runner and barely made it around the block. There was such a great energy all around and yet it was such a quiet and still morning. There were people all around so even though I was running without a friend, I felt in great company. I was surprised at how great I felt the whole time and how easy it felt to run in a race. My training runs were SO SO SO SO much harder. My longest training run was 11 miles and it felt like 1100 miles running alone. I continued to feel better than ever until just past mile 10. The last 3 miles were the first that felt even a little challenging. But the last mile felt very difficult. When I had been passing people all along the way, that last mile lots of people were passing me, and I couldn't seem to go faster or even care to. I crossed the finish line at 1:54. I was really happy, just under 2 hours! Jer and the boys were waiting for me at the finish. I ended up keeping an 8:45 min per mile pace and placed 45th (ha) in my age bracket. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect first race.