I finally finished!!

Last weekend I finally ran the half marathon I had been training for for six months! Can I just say that training takes MUCH more time than i had anticipated and with a baby and no husband it made it that much harder. i could have never done it without my mama to watch my baby!! I spent hours every evening and packed up every weekend to spend the night at grandma's so I could spend the bulk of my long runs while mia was still sleeping. I will NOT miss getting up at 4:45am. Needless to say I will possibly never do this again because it is so time consuming!! And I'm not having any LESS kids anytime soon... only more! So I really enjoyed training even though it was hard and I am SO HAPPY I finished something I started, even when I thought it was impossible. Sometimes I would come in the door from a hard  and tell my mom "i cant do it!! I will never be able to do it"! I thought all hope was lost when I got really really sick for the better half of two weeks. But in the end... I DID IT!!!

I was really lucky to have Daniel home race day morning because he was still "on call" and could have been gone on a fire. My mom came to watch Mia, and Daniel and I were off! We got downtown around 5:45 and it was FREEZING. Like seriously freezing. But I already felt so excited and nervous! There were over 1,000 runners!

WARNING: action snap shots are not very pretty :) but I will share them anyway

Going to line up for the start!

I felt so amateur next to all of these runners!!

I lined up in the very very back. You cant see but there are like 600 people in front of me.

This picture makes me laugh so hard. Could she get any taller blonder or skinnier or tanner?? Oh and then there I am with my dorky water pack :) haha

They shot the cap gun and we were off! A lot of people told me not too start out too fast so I started out really slow. And it was FREEZING and I couldn't get into a running groove cuz i couldn't feel my hands! So the first two miles I wish I went a little faster but A mountain I started to pass people.

That was around mile 2... still getting warmed up. Daniel parked on the side of the road. He was so funny through out the run he would pop up in the most random places!

I was headed towards A mountain and I saw the first FASTEST guy already coming down the mountain!! My goal in the run was to NOT STOP AT ALL. I was a little scared for a mountain but it ended up not being bad at all. It was really really pretty and they had a water station half way up. Also they had the coolest HUGE drum players that echoed through out the mountains! It was really cool! They kept a beat to run to.

I took this on my way up around the back side of the mt. SO PRETTY!

The top of A mt was mile 4 and then we started down to santa cruise river for miles 5-9.

That was about mile 8 and Daniel popped up again!

Around mile 9 my mom, my sister, Mia and my little nephews Kash and Ky showed up! I was so happy to see them!! Mia was holding a little "go mommy" sign and it made me so happy! I have such a fun supportive family!

Mile 10-11 was probably the hardest. I was hoping that my family might pop up again for an extra boost! Sure enough they were at the end of mile 11!

After seeing the fam I gave it my last effort to the finish!!

It was SO FUN!! Such a satisfying and enjoyable experience! Having my family there made it that much better :)