#1 HALF MARATHON- CHECK

Run a half marathon

The start of the project, the first one the list has now been crossed off.

My dear friend Stacey and I headed to Moab to run the Canyonlands Half Marathon. All the training, running, smart eating, was hopefully gonna pay off.

I got the flu a week before the race and lost 6 lbs. Not good, so I rested and didn't run at all for 10 days pre race. The nerves were high but thank God for moral support! My friend Stacey and I keep saying..."We are doing this!" with the dear in the headlights stare!

In the gitters of the morning (we may have) forgotten our race bags, had no pins, and no patience to wait for a proper porta potty. (thank you big giant rocks of the canyon) But we nervously jumped into the massive crowd and waited. It was breathtaking in beauty to look around at God's creation and marvel, rocks and river meeting and thousands of people running for the goal. I am amazed that of all the people I know, Stacey and I are both fulltime working moms that are very involved in church and our families and we proved that it can be done. No excuses, no way out-if there is a will there is a way! She ran from mile 5 with "gigantar" blister forming on her foot. And mile 10 it hit us, holy cow. Mile 10-13 was the hardest thing I have ever done. Mentally that was a new ceiling I broke through, challenging and eventually rewarding! At the home stretch we hear families cheering and we can see the finish line when we hear people looking in our direction.... "GO GRANDMA!!!" We turn around to see grandma closing in! We made eye contact with each other and dug for the last energy we had to finish! We laughed later about that "grandma almost beat us". ( I am sure hundred of grandma's finished before us too) We ran the whole thing, I am sure Stacey could have knocked off 10 min from our time if running alone. But she hung with me the entire race.

We finished in 2 hr 40 min. My goal was no walking and don't get picked up by the carts! (Step up from "not to die") Neither happened and I didn't feel sick at all afterwards which was a plus. However we were super sore, and poor Stacey the "gigantar" blister was huge by the next day!

You might be wondering -then what was the point? What did ya learn? What I took away from this is all my fears slowly trickled away when I took a bite out of this fear of the word "marathon" and started to chew. The idea and process took awhile to chew, swallow then digest. But man did I feel full afterwards. Tears of joys -that I didn't let fear hold me from trying and also from succeeding.

Fear was only there to hold me prisoner to the possibility of failure. Once I realized, worse thing is I fail then a new world of possible opened up.