Perhaps if we believed in signs we would have seen this weekend’s madness coming but alas we did not…..
As you may know we had a race this weekend in Austin, the ZOOMA’s [women geared yet men are welcome!] race series half marathon. Because we live in North Dallas we were not able to make the expo so we had to have our bibs mailed, and due to uncontrolled matters Beth did not receive her bib. We were a little worried/stressed but we were able to get that solved [thanks to Tricia for helping us out!]. Teal, worried about chaffing as usual and really wanted to stop at Lululemon for a running skirt. So much so she was willing to try anything (and yes, body glide is not totally working). We stopped, shopped, and then sat down and ate dinner. We actually didn’t leave North Texas until after 8. Whoops?? We arrived in Austin to literally crawl in bed to wake up in less than 6 hours.
We got up, realized we hadn’t prepared food wise for the race and basically were like – Whelp, what can we do? Not a good sign here for us. We had PB sandwiches and shared some Swedish fish left over from our Rock ‘n’ Roll race weekend. Haha.
The race started right on time and it is clear that neither of were really paying all that much attention because as soon as we crossed the start line we had to run up our first of MANY hills.
This one was not too bad, but we kind of looked at each other in a “oh lord, is this a sign of things to come?” way. We knew the race was a “challenging course” per the website, but we really had NO CLUE what we were about to get into, we hadn’t seen or maybe missed an elevation map. So we were completely clueless!!
As you know we both had just come off of pretty successful half’s the week before at RnR Dallas, and it was clear within a mile that our legs were not feeling it. Teal looked at Beth and was said “I feel like a brick” Beth agreed. Crap! We kept running along, Beth decided for fun to keep track of the hills we ran because it was that crazy. After mile two, we had counted 9 hills. We are not talking little ant hills, these things were insane. We started walking up the 9th hill at mile 2. NINTH! Oh crap. We have 11.1 miles left. 13.1 had never seemed so long before to us.
We continued this, “run down, walk up,” business that we are both very sad to admit happened. Because for us, it’s just personal preference for the two of us, but we aren’t run/walkers. There was just no way! We can honestly say that we checked out mentally and our bodies were not there physically, which made matters worse. Oh and maybe we can pour a little salt on the wound with this screen shot of our weather.
Stinking spring humidity in Texas is no joke. There was a breeze but yuck, thick air.
We decided that we would basically not let the 2:20 pacer pass up. 2:20! Good lord! What was happening?? The hills literally just kept coming. Some were so steep that EVERYONE around us walked. We honestly think crawling them would have worked just as well. After the race our trust Runkeeper app informed us that this was our highest elevation EVER. We have used Runkeeper for going on almost a year and a half now.
We had no clue where the course went but luckily we ran (haha!) into this lady in front of us who was running this course for the 4th time. We give her uber props! She said we had about 2 miles out and back then around the golf course on the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines resort. Ok! How bad could that be? Yah, bad. We made it down the 2 miles out and still just felt blah, we walked a little, ran a little, ran up a few hills, but then we were just both so mentally checked out that pushing anything was just terrible.
Beth had miscounted (yep, did we mention mentally checked out??) and thought we had 3 left just as we hit 9. She looks at Teal and was like 5k left. Right? Nope 4. We walked. That is deflating!
We hit the golf course at around 11. This is a mental issue too. We had to do a little “trail” running. We had to run on this mulch stuff that takes every ounce of bounce out of your legs. Teal looked at Beth and said “ I do NOT want to finish.” Luckily, Beth in her logic was like, “you don’t have to, but you’ll still have to go back that way.” UGH. Might as well finish at this point.
We did some more walking. Grrr!! and managed to run it in right around 2:20ish. This marks our worst half marathon to date for each of us. It was bound to happen, we know, but we were still a little blah about the entire thing. This marked our 10th half marathon but really you wouldn’t know it by how it went for us.
We hung out after and were luckily able to grab a glass of wine from the Barefoot Wine garden and met some nice ladies out there! Fun hearing other ladies’ running stories, but ultimately we decided to just get home to Dallas!
Oh, but wait, we consulted the twitterverse as to where in Austin we should get lunch so with the recommendation of a twitter friend we stopped off at Moonshine for lunch. If you are ever in need of a place to eat when you are visiting Austin then store Moonshine in your memory bank! And uhhh, we HAD to stop by an Austin Lululemon and uhhh, we were in Austin we HAD to stop by The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf! Y’all, have we told you we love that place??
We pretty much passed the time in the car singing along to and every CD that Beth had in her car. There might have been some dancing too….
