Provo half marathon

Utah is the place to go for races. Seriously there are a handful every weekend and they are on Saturday. 

Since Liz and Jimmy's wedding stuff ended on Friday, we took advantage and signed up for the Provo River half marathon. I have run this before and love the course. Erika and Chad signed up with us so Erika and I started texting each other with updates on pace etc. We even did our last long runs together when they were here in Reno. 

We stayed at Carols house in Provo the night before and right before we were going to bed and setting out our stuff, I realized I had forgotten a sports bra...who forgets that? I hurried and found one to borrow from Lindsay, got back to Carols and then didn't fall asleep until after 2 pm. Only to wake up at 4:00. Needless to say I was going on very few hours over a couple of nights. I was exhausted! But luckily the excitement of races gave me a little adrenaline. 

So basically Erika paced me the first ten miles. Leading up to the race, she kept saying there was no way she could keep up with me so I was expecting a comfortable pace. She kicked it out in the beginning and never let go of the pace. We stayed just below the eight-minute pace the first 10 miles. I was wearing the watch and I think it worried me a lot. She kept saying, I'm relying on you to keep me going the last couple miles but she really took the juice out of me and my fatigue was deep. But we kept going, the last mile was a bit brutal because you could see the end of the race the whole time. We wanted to do around an 8:30 pace and we ended up with 8:09, 1 hr 46 min., which we were so pleased with. 

Doug and Chad did great too, they got 1:41.

There was a kids marathon later on. The kids had to log 25 miles prior to the race and then they'd run the last 1.2 miles.  I loved that the girls had something to train for, it wasn't always easy to get them out the door and training but it was all worth it watching them run the race. They did awesome and just felt so proud of themselves. They even had the kids run into the finishers chute, which made them feel all the more special.

Before loading the bus