Charlottesville Half Marathon

New Year's Eve, Dan and I were sitting around watching the terrible TV options available on such a night (I think it was Ryan Seacrest's New Year's Eve or something) (we don't have cable), and I guess we got talking about things we'd like to do in 2014. We thought it would be fun to try another half. Charlottesville was perfect because it gave us enough time to train and my parents could hopefully watch the kids. After we called and made sure they were good with that, we signed up. (The price went up the next day.)

We trained all winter, which was pretty tough considering how cold and snowy this winter was. Dan ran outside all the time, but I mostly ran on the treadmill at the gym a lot until the past few months or so when the weather got much nicer.

Anyway, race day finally came and last Saturday we laced up our sneakers to run. Dan decided to run with me the whole way, which was really helpful. I had two goals: The first was to beat my time from last year (2:26) and the second was more specific - get under 2:15. (That would be approx 10:17/mile. I'm not very fast.)

Before the race.

Like I mentioned, having Dan run with me was really great. He kept me going. It was a pretty hilly course and there was a big hill at mile 11 where I walked for the last little bit, but other than that, we ran (shuffled, really) the whole way. For Dan it was a breeze, but it was tough for me. We finished with a time of 2:15:37. SO close. Guess I'll have to run one more someday.

 Big thank you to Mom and Dad who watched our kids and came to cheer us on.