Race day!

Since October, Ty has been watching the kids almost every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings (yes, I did sleep in a few times) so I could go to 5:45am workouts with Gilbert's Gazelles running group. I trained for the Austin half-marathon that was a few weeks ago. Gotta say, training with Gilbert really made me feel like I was back in college again in many ways - grueling, morning workouts, having teammates to run hill repeats with, getting my butt kicked on track repeats (sprinting has never been my strong suit), and miles and miles of endless conversation on old roads with new friends. I guess all that training paid off because my time for the 3M half was 1:43 (a 10-minute improvement from my time in 2010) and 1:44 for the Austin half (a 23-minute improvement from last year)! Granted, I was only 4-months postpartum at last year's race. But still, the training really improved my speed and efficiency. I definitely plan on training with Gilbert again in the fall. For now, I think I may try my hand at triathlons, just to change it up a little bit. Unfortunately, it seems that training means I'll have to keep waking up early. I've already found some master's swim classes on Mon/Wed mornings at.... yep, you guessed it.... 5:45am :(

Here I am on the last hill of the race.

Ugh... so tired!

This is my new friend, Karin. She was a rockstar and ran her 1st FULL marathon!

This is Gilbert. I ran with him in college at ACU and now it's fun to have him as my coach. He has an inspiring story about surviving genocide that you can read about in his autobiography, "A Voice in My Heart."

The Gazelle's on race day