Survivor: SLC 5K

Well, we did it.  John, Alex and I survived our very first 5k race.  After much grumbling all night long (mostly by John), we got our butts up at 5:30, packed anything and everything we could possibly ever need for the morning and got to the starting line almost an hour early.  This actually worked out well because it gave Alex a chance to run around Liberty Park before he had to get strapped into the jogger for the rest of the event.  Despite the fact that we were up at the crack of dawn, and I'd only had one cup of coffee, we still managed to put on our happy faces for the race.

We had to start at the back of the pack because of the stroller, but barely 10 minutes into it, mostly because of my husbands crazy cartoon roadrunner legs, we passed up many of the walkers and even caught up to some of the slower joggers.

4-21-07 SLC Marathon 5K - 999, originally uploaded by mrsjwd9.

We even had our own paparazzi (aka Grandma Jen) .  Click on the picture (or here) and view her photo set on Flickr.  This set has more photos of my butt than there are in all existence.  Enjoy :)

In the end we finished at about 44 minutes (we'll get the official times in a couple of days).  That's a full 6 minutes faster than what I've been doing all month.  Not so bad methinks.  Jen and I had to practically jog most of the way to keep up with John.  He was pushing Alex in the stroller weaving in and out of slower walkers.  He's the freaking Mario Andretti of race walkers.  And that's without doing any training before hand.  I have no hope of keeping up when he gets in better shape.

All in all it was a good time.  Unexpectedly.  I didn't really understand what the big deal was about finishing a race, but when Jen and I ran across the finish line (me cussing up a storm the whole way because that's all I could do to keep my mind off of falling over dead - remember, I don't run), I never felt so good about being finished with something since pushing out my son lo those many months ago. 

On the way home from the race, Alex snoring in the backseat (it takes a lot of energy being pushed around in a stroller you know), John and I talked about how motivating it was to see those marathoners coming in at the finish line and how great it felt to have been able to do our little 5k as out of shape as we are.  We hope to participate in more races this summer in the hopes of bettering our time, and possibly our physiques, in the process.