Saturday, November 2, 2019

Snow Canyon 1/2 Marathon

Trista and I got together again and did another race this month.  We decided to do the Snow Canyon Half Marathon.  We have done this race before and we both liked it.
This time we also got our other childhood friend, Heidi, to come run with us as well.  This was kind of a girls weekend for us all.  The kids had basketball games on the day of the race so Russell stayed home with them while I took Charlotte with me to St. George.  

On the morning of the race, I picked up Trista and we drove to Snow Canyon High School and the finish line of the race.  From there we got on the buses to ride to the starting line. We kept texting Heidi to see where she was but she had not gotten to the buses yet.  When we got to the starting line just passed Diamond Valley, we felt the wind blast us.  It was so cold.  We had dressed warm but we were not expecting it to be so cold.  We huddled together but were still chilled.  We were wishing we had the silver emergency blankets.  After about a half hour Heidi and her sister and friends got off the last bus.  Guess what they had... The emergency blankets!  Trista and I could not believe that the last bus got the blankets and nobody else did.  Heidi and her friends shared their blankets with us so that was nice.  We also huddled in with all of the rest of the runners for warmth.  Finally it was time to start the race.  We threw our warm clothes into the truck and started running.  This was a beautiful race.  We ran down through Snow Canyon Park and the scenery was amazing.  The nice thing about this race is it is all downhill so that helped the times and effort. 

Out of all the races I have done, I have never had a good race picture.  But these pictures turned out pretty good! These pictures were taken in Snow Canyon Park at about mile 6.  I felt so good during this race.  All of us started out running together but then I got the adrenaline and had to push it faster.  In the end I finished strong.  For some reason this half marathon felt much easier than the full marathon.
I finished with a time of 1:45.  That is my fastest time since getting back into running.  The last time I ran this race in 2015, my time was 1:42 which is my PR for half marathons.  I felt really good after the race.  I received my finisher medal and some post race food and then waited for a bit for the rest of my friends to come through.  Heidi was about 5 minutes behind me and then Trista was a couple minutes after that.  Heidi's friends kicked all of our butts though.  They were in the top 50 with times in the 1:30s!  We all did great!

It was so fun getting together with Trista and Heidi and running.  We all had a good time.  It was nice being together again after not seeing each other for a few years.  It was like we had never missed a day though which was really nice.

The medals were huge this year.  They are probably 5x5 inches!  They are pretty cool.  At the finish line we saw this awesome Planters Peanut mobile.  We even got a free bag of peanuts for taking a picture with the peanut mobile.  It was so funny.

After the race we all went out for lunch at Cafe Rio.  We had a good time chatting and catching up on old times.  It was fun to just get away for a girls weekend.  

Charlotte and I had a good time together and she especially loved hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa all day while I ran.  In the meantime, Russell sent me pictures from the other kids' games and they did awesome too.  Logan even scored a basket!  We headed home Sunday to get back to life.

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