Cooper River Bridge Run

Now that it has been a week since we ran the Cooper River Bridge Run, I thought it would be appropriate to bring you an update on how we did :)

We traveled down to Charleston (without our kids-amazing!). We means me, Amy Noll, Alicia Keel (sophomore from Montreat), Matt, Ben Johnson and Brandon Club (freshman from UNCA).

We stayed at Matt's cousins house and it was awesome to have an amazing house, with real beds to go to sleep in the night before a race.

Ben Johnson's mom (who was on a vacation in Charleston) made us a dinner along with a few other of their friends who were running the race. Again, super nice to have a home cooked meal and not have to fight 38,000 runners for dinner in Charleston that night.

The group at 6am. Bleary-eyed and freezing.

We had to get up at 5am in order to get across the bridge in time and for Ben to be able to drive the car BACK across the bridge into Charleston. So we arrived for our 8am race at 6. Awesome.

It was also freezing. Like 40 degrees freezing. Luckily for us, we ALL have been running in that kind of weather all winter long, so it suited us. But still-not exactly what we had in mind. I was so grateful for my running gloves and my base layer shirt. SO GRATEFUL.

In order to warm up, I joined in with a group of runners doing the electric slide.

You'll do anything. I swear.

We also peed 3 times in one hour. We got out of the port-a-potties and then got immediately back in line.

Ugh .

But the race then started, and because I was hanging with Alicia Keel who paces out 8 minute miles and Amy Noll...we started a blistering pace. But I was surprisingly fine. But as we approached the peak of the bridge, I couldn't hang with Alicia any longer and lost her in the crowd. Somehow, I dropped Amy Noll though. So I ended up just running the race alone. Kind of stinky, but there was no one to worry about so I just ran. Hard.

I ended up finishing with a time 49:39. Which is just over 8 minute miles. 8 MINUTE MILES! WooHOO. I was really excited about my time and performance overall. I finished as the 633 overall woman in the race, out of 19,355 and 109th out of 2,926 in my age group. None of that means anything, except that I was really happy. And now I feel really pushed to work harder and do another race very soon.

Matt did awesome too! He finished just over 56 minutes. But this picture makes me laugh because even though he has never run this distance before AND he finished way ahead of when he thought he would...this picture just takes him down. Because a 12 year old is pacing him. Brutal.

We are looking for our next race to do. I would like to do another 10k, Matt is thinking 5k. Anyone out there doing something fun or have a fun event in their town coming up in the next month? I would love to do something before we leave for Colorado.