What are your go to running gear items when you travel?
Wordless Wednesday No. 18
Trinity River Levee Run
I woke up Friday morning with beginnings of a cold coming on. Ugh, not so perfect timing! But got to bed early for a 6 a.m. wake up call for the 10k. That seemed SO late considering how early Teal & I woke up for Princess Half!
First I should backup and say the packet pickup at Luke’s was pretty easy at Luke’s Locker especially since I heeded the advice from email to know my bib number before getting there. I walked up to the nice fireman, told him bib 962 and in under 30 seconds I was off and looking at the running clothes sale. 🙂 Kudos to this race for having firemen help with packet pickup! 🙂
I’d seen multiple things regarding driving directions to the race and I had every intention of following them until I found myself on the exact street it said to avoid. Oh, well! Quickly parked on the opposite side of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge from where the race started, but ultimately I was glad because I got to walk across it twice in addition to running across it!
After crossing the bridge I found my friends Mary, Cory, Tom and Paige pretty quickly and in no time it seemed like we were off! Since Teal was on a field trip with her students I just assumed I’d be running this race by myself and I was totally wrong! Tom and I ended up running pretty much the whole race together. We chatted about anything and everything! Talking during races and even during training runs is not something I commonly do, so it was a nice change of pace. Tom kept me updated periodically on what our pace was. I knew I’d want to do another 6ish mile run later in the day so I was too concerned with pushing real hard in this race. Overall the course was fun, lots of awesome volunteers out passing out powerade and water. I don’t frequent that area of town all that much so it was fun seeing everything around there.
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The results for this race were a little tricky to find or maybe I’m just not that use to having to click on so many links to be taken to a word document containing a link that holds my results? My chip time was 57:41, 201st female to finish and 661st person to finish overall. The thing I was most proud of in this race was the kick I gave at the end. When I stopped my runkeeper at the end it said I had been running at a 7:14 pace! So excited to see the difference my hill and tempo workouts have given me in a short amount of time! Would also, like to give a shout out to Teal’s workout buddy, Cynthia I saw out there! Wish I would have seen you after the race!
After the race was over I made sure to take a picture of one of the three murals that Shepherd Fairey recently put up on Singleton Avenue in Dallas. Tons of people were having their picture taken with the murals so I got just this one with no one else in the picture before I headed out.
On my walk back to the car I took advantage of the time and snapped some more pictures of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge or as I’ve already heard some referring to it as #largeMarge. I’m going to hold out and put one of my favorite pictures I took walking across the bridge to the race on Facebook only, so come find it on our Facebook page! And if you haven’t liked us on Facebook yet – why not??
Later that afternoon I headed out for a 6 mile run that I was hoping would include some hills. I set off on a bit of a new route for me, and to be honest in the beginning I wasn’t completely feeling this run. As I was nearing the halfway point of my run which also was the point where I was running down my soon to be monster hill to run up, I saw a police officer and contemplated asking him to give me a ride home if I wimped out on the hill. But let’s be honest – no matter how much I wanted to wimp out I wasn’t going to. The hill was hard, but once I did it and recovered from it I felt great! The whole last half of my run was fabulous! I get more of a high from running when I accomplish something hard out in the course than if it was just completely flat. Run #2 on Saturday felt like another victory for my tempo and hill workouts!
Hope everyone had a fabulous weekend! There were so many people out racing and Teal & I are both excited to see your race recaps! 🙂
The Rest of Our Princess Weekend
We both took off Friday from work, woke up bright & early to get our pack on before we headed to the airport. When we were booking our flights we KEPT seeing that flights were cheaper into Tampa than into Orlando which we discovered was perfect because we could go to the beach!!!
We boarded our plane and literally talked to each other non stop for the 2ish hour flight. Once we got off the plane and got our bags on the advice of our friend Robbie, we headed off to Clearwater Beach!
It was actually pretty chilly out at the beach, so we didn’t last that long out there. We ate dinner at Frenchy’s South Beach Cafe which was pretty much across the street from the part of the beach we had settled down on, so we had a beautiful view at dinner. After that we figured it was time to make the drive to Orlando, which wasn’t too bad we both were just really tired. After getting checked in we pretty much got in our beds with our books and read until we fell asleep. We had to make sure the sleep two nights before the race was decent as we knew there was a good chance the night before would not be!
Saturday morning we woke up, read, and worked on our Fab Ab Feb goal before we headed down to the hotel gym to get in a few miles on the treadmill. We showered and off we went to try a restaurant that was new to us – Cafe Tu Tu Tango.
While Beth drank her Matisse Margarita and Teal drank her Michelangelo Mojito, we decide to claim carb loading with our meal selections. Ha, this is a tapas restaurant so we shared everything which meant the White Bean, Sun Dried Tomato& Artichoke Spread, Cajun Chicken Egg Rolls, Prosciutto & Mango Flatbread, Langostino Mac & Cheese and Oriental Marinated Steak Skewers. It was all dee-licious! After lunch it was off to Wide World of Sports Complex to hit up the expo and get our bibs!
We didn’t stay too terribly long at the expo, but we both made sure to pick up a couple things of Nuun [grape for Teal & tri-berry for Beth]. How can you beat the price of $5 a tube? Yah, exactly. Beth got herself some new TOMS 🙂 We met Heidi & Brian for dinner at Portobello in Downtown Disney. Those two weren’t lying when they said that place was gooood! We may or may not have hit up Ghirardelli after dinner for a treat before checking out the largest Disney store ever and people watching.
We called it a night pretty early as we all had to get back to our hotels and clearly we had a race to run the next day which you read allll about yesterday!
After the race was over we found ourselves an Einstein’s and got bagels, went back to the hotel and began being lazy for a little bit. Beth started tweet talking with some friends about how we reeeally wanted to go see Harry Potter World. One of the ladies had been before and told us to quit dilly dallying as Harry Potter fans are crazy and the park would be crazy! How does she know this? Because she’s one of those people! Her words! Ha. So @lastgoodnerve thanks for the push to go! We bought tickets to Islands of Adventure at Universal in our hotel lobby and made our way there. Harry Potter here we come!
We got in the park and we could see it!
This is the part of the blog were you get an excessive amount of pictures so, um, ENJOY! What you see as you walk up to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter …can you spot Teal in the picture?
We were in HEAVEN for real! Our first stop was at the Hogwarts Express and we had our picture taken with the conductor. He was so fun! He thanked us for coming from the country of Texas to visit him. 🙂
At this point we hadn’t had lunch so we were anxious to eat some sort of food so off we went to Three Broomsticks for a feast of roasted chicken, potatoes and corn. Then we went to checkout Zonko’s and Honeyduke’s!
At this point it actually started to rain a little bit so we took that as an opportunity to go into Hog’s Head and try Butterbeer for the first time. We opted for sharing one instead of us both getting one and not finishing them….yah, we didn’t even finish the one we were sharing. It was good, different, but good!
Then we made our way up to Hogwart’s itself! If we are being honest neither one of us is really that big on rides, but we went ahead and rode the Harry Potter and the Forbbiden Journey ride. Which is where we got to see the sorting hat while we were in line for the ride! We should also take a break to mention that there is a bathroom that has Moaning Myrtle in it…..loved how much they put into this place! Don’t worry we both made sure to check into Moaning Myrtle’s Bathroom on Foursquare. 🙂
We walked around in Dervish and Banges and the Owl Post. We looked pretty much at anything and everything we could while we were there. Since we weren’t willing to shell out $100 each for a cape we decided to trythem on and simply having our picture taken in them. 🙂
The ticket price into the park was totally worth it to both of us solely so we could see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! It was awesome and something we’ll always remember, BUT since there were technically some other parts of the park we decided to explore them too. We had our pictures taken with character’s in Seuss Landing.
We checked out Jurassic Park. Beth was excited about this because Jurassic Park is one of those movies for her fiance that when it is on TV he has to watch it which means she watches it or at least bits and pieces a lot.
We walked through Marvel Super Hero Island just as Wolverine, Captain America, Spiderman, Storm & Rogue were making their grand entrance. We made our way through the Lost Continent, but didn’t really do much there. We did stop for a cheesy photo opp in Toon Town and sent pictures to the boys at home. 🙂
And then we found Popeye and Olive Oil!
We spent a little over four hours walking around Universal’s Islands of Adventure and by that time we’d seen pretty much everything. Our legs and feet were killing us. Yah, for the walking back to the car part of getting out of there. We opted to order room service because we just didn’t want to be getting in and out of the car. Thanks Zest restaurant at Sheraton Safari for having delish food for us to eat while we chit chatted, watched the Oscars, tweeted, and read. We like to multi-task! The next morning we read some more, packed up our suitcases and got on the road to Tampa.
We prepaid for gas when we got our rent car and we were bound and determined to use up that tank! Hope they were able to drive our little Ford Focus to their gas pumps because it was seriously teetering a fine line of being completely out of gas. We are awwesome! We checked into our flights and were kind of freaking out that our boarding passes printed out with no assigned seats – uhh, did you overbook and we aren’t going to really be on this flight?? All was fine until we got on the flight and had lots of turbulence. Pretty sure we’ve mentioned it before but we had a bad flight together in 2006 that Beth has blocked out and Teal remembers very clearly hitting a patch of dead air and a drop. Needless to say Teal has reservations with every plane ride, but she handled the turbulence on this flight like a champ! We got back to Dallas and were ready to get our butts home except for when we got to Teal’s car it was uhhh, dead. Thank you Airport Support for coming to our rescue and giving us a jump! It really was a wonderful weekend full of so much fun stuff!
Princesses for a Day: Race Recap
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Our alarm clock went off at 3:00 a.m.! Holy cow, Disney! We get it – you want everyone to get through and out of your parks before they open, but that is one early wake up call for a 5:45 a.m. race not to mention you HAD to be in your corral by 5:00 a.m. or ELSE! Ha (Guess who wasn’t in their corral by 5:00 a.m.??) We got dressed in our princess costumes and were out the door of Sheraton Safari by 3:40 a.m. ready to face race traffic. Pretty sure we in the car for an hour which gave us time to make peanut butter sandwiches to keep us fueled.
Once we parked we had a good 20 minute walk to our corral, so we decided to not stop to use the rest room because it was slight madness. Plus we were running late at this point to get into the corral on time. When we got to the corral area we knew that Heidi was in corral B so we began looking for her just knowing we would see her at the front of that corral. Good thing we started looking early because there were Heidi & Brian at the front of corral C. Apparently if you are a Prince running this race you can’t go any higher up than corral C.
We are not quite sure how it happened but we both were assigned the same corral for like the first time EVER and we were in corral A! It was awesome to be up front in a line of 20,000 people!
We started right on time! Way to go Disney and since we had made getting to our corral a priority over anything else we both decided to make an immediate stop at the first port-o-potties we spotted on the course! The whole first of half of the race flew by so it’s hard to remember everything by miles totally. Our plan was to run together, treat it as a training run and take pictures with characters when we wanted to do so. The competitive side to both of us still lives on a bit in that we still wanted a decent time despite the stops, but again we were fortunate to be in corral A because this gave us the advantage of being in front of thousands of people who would want to stop as well. We did stop at the first group of characters that we saw….
We really didn’t have a plan at who to stop at or what we wanted to do we just knew that we wanted to see our princesses! We ended up stopping at Buzz Lightyear who of course is a favorite not only to us but our little nephews! As you will find out through our pictures it’s a good thing we stopped because Princess Ariel ended up not being on the course! 🙁
Somewhere in the mile 7 part of the course we found Beth’s character – Belle! Wonder what all the characters came up with to say to people as they were having their picture taken because Belle said to Beth “it looks like you’ve been in my closet!”
Speaking of mile markers! We loved the signs for each mile! At mile 8 we finally snapped a picture of one:
There were a couple of hills in the last few miles and thanks to one of the toy soldiers from Toy Story for the encouragement to conquer the hill in mile 10. It was amazing how his voice was exactly like the movie! We’ve said before we aren’t really big on stopping and starting on a run which is completely a personal preference we both share. The picture breaks were hard on our bodies, but we pressed on despite that. In hindsight it might have been a blessing in disguise that Ariel was not seen out there because our last stop at Belle was rough! Our bodies might have been hurting but with the kick we gave it at the end you never would have known! If you look at our runkeeper entries for this race Teal finished her last .1 in a 6:20 pace and Beth finished in her last .1 in a 8:03 pace. Perhaps this speaks to how it’s hard to have a GPS device be completely accurate as we crossed the finish line right next to each other. A more accurate pace would probably be an average of the two times something more in the 7 minute range. We were hauling! We are really good at keep training runs JUST training runs. 🙂
Half Marathon number eight is in the bag! We did and our very proud of ourselves! Our official time was 2:13:35 exactly for both of us, and we tried to stop and start our runkeeper when would take picture breaks because we wanted to know the difference :), so that time was 2:03:49. By the time we were finished both of us had A LOT of our fuel for the race leftover – swedish fish. Once Teal got some ice on her foot and knee and Beth put biofreeze on her knees and calves we grabbed our checked bag and were out of there to find food. We were staaaarving!
So now we have 1/2 of the Coast to Coast challenge finished and just need to complete Disneyland Half Marathon in September which we thankfully got signed up in time as it was sold out before we left for the Princess Half! Check back with us tomorrow to see what all we did in the non racing parts of the weekend! 🙂
10 Reasons We Love to Run
So we love all things #runchat which means we HAD to participate in their blog challenge to list 10 things we love about running keeping in mind if we were never going to run again.
1. All the fun gear – shoes, jackets, socks you know….ALL of it! 🙂
2. FRUNNERS!!! [we stole this term from our Dallas area running friends] We have met so many people since we started blogging and our twitter account. We are SO thankful to them for the advice, support, encouragement, motivation and so much more!
(pictures courtesy of Mama C)
3. Bling Bling! Who doesn’t love being rewarded at the end of a race with shiny medal? And who doesn’t love being reminded of the things they’ve accomplished by looking back at a shiny medal?
4. Getting a break! Love being able to get out on the road and be free of the stresses and concerns of the day! It’s so liberating to free your mind of all of that!
5. Testing your limits and realizing you are a whole heck of a lot stronger than you even knew you were!
6. That we each have a an awesome running buddy! 🙂
7. Those mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed and run because you just don’t feel like, and then you go anyways and the run is freakin’ fantastic!
8. Feeling healthy on a daily basis because we are active and watch what we eat so that we can be better runs.
9. Travel to races! While we have only left the great state of Texas once so far for a race we LOVED having that opportunity to travel to California and experience new things there as well as a new course. At the end of this month our racing will take us to Florida, and we are looking into other states for our next marathon! There are plenty of races in cities that we might not experience or we might just experience in a new way because we came there to run!
10. Eating! There are so many calories and so many food items we would have to cut back on if we just flat out stopped running. We aren’t talking we run and then go eat the greasiest hamburger and largest order of fries ever, but there are a lot of foods we get to partake in because we are so active with running!
As a side note it was fun seeing our picture on the #runchat website this morning!
Did we leave out something that is key to your running? Let us know – we want to hear what you love about running!
Seven Things Friday
1. We are going to AUSTIN today after work!! Wheee!
2. So that we can volunteer at the 3M Half Marathon!
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3. We are SO excited to get to meet these two:
You know also known as @runthetrailsCO & @cisforcourtney
4. We are officially signed up for the ZOOMA Austin Half on March 31, 2012!! We have a discount code good through the 31st for $5 off the 5k or $10 off the Half! Let us know if you want to join us and we’ll let ya have it! 🙂
5. Neither of us have actually run in Austin and you know what? We are going to change that this weekend!
6. We canNOT wait to get coffee at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – have been dreaming about it since our last trip to Austin!
7. We really wanted to post 27 things because, uh, duh – today is the 27th! BUT we thought that was excessive and that we wanted to keep our readers around! 😉 Thanks for hanging in there with us! 🙂
[Not Entirely] Marathon Running Weekend Part 2
Last year we both ran the Too Cold to Hold race together and just on whim decided to do it again. Beth mentioned wanting to run and Teal of course agreed. It’s not too hard to persuade each other to run something around here! You might recall Teal’s recap of her 5k on Saturday which started out at 36 degrees and in keeping with the craziness that is Texas weather, we were again not too surprised that our run started out Sunday morning at 52 degrees and ended up with a high of 78 for the day. Definitely NOT Too Cold too Hold!
We really were not all that prepared again for this race and had to discuss directions again. Whoops! Hopefully this direction problem isn’t turning into a trend. 🙂 We got to the park and made a b-line to the port-o-potties as usual. We ran into one of Beth’s Fiancé’s friend’s Hanes who we didn’t know would be there!
We waited around and met/chatted with many of our twitter friends and even met some new people in real life! SO good to meet Lee a.k.a. @runneronabudget and his son, Angel out there! Bonus for sure and really chatting with them was the only really highlights of this day.
We started out the race together as we both basically decided to run this race as a training run and not a true race since we have been a little off in our training. Beth had run about 9.5 miles on Saturday and Teal around 7, plus both of us did yoga, so our legs were in no way shape or form rested.
The race was in a word “normal”- nothing new or different and no real problems besides this dude who kept swerving in and out from us. At one point he basically cut Beth off weaving, would run backwards, look back and weirdly smile and randomly cheer for people whilst running backwards. We couldn’t decide if he was running tangents or dizzy or what…We have no clue what he was doing but kept us entertained for a while due to he weirdness. 🙂
Around 4.5 we got the BEST surprise! This race is kind of boring because there are literally no spectators besides finished runners at the end so we were both pumped to see Heidi and Brian cheering us on around the turn around. This pumped us up and made it a little easier to keep running. We made it a point to wave and cheer on our fellow North Texas Runners in an effort to pass time and keep from being bored, and of course be supportive.
Teal and Beth split at about the 6 mile mark which made the last 3 miles a drain. At around 9 Teal saw Heidi again and she ran her in right up to the finish line! Such a great cheering surprise for a relatively routine and regular race!
Afterwards we hung around to celebrate Michelle’s birthday and eat with our running friends at Fuzzy’s! We got to here all about Greg’s upcoming 100miler at Rocky Raccoon in Huntsville and hang out with their precious girls, an all over great ending to the day!
Shout out to Mama C the awesome picture taker…we stole two pictures from you and the term frunner! =)
It was also SO good to meet Michelle a.k.a. Drum at this race! We finally after a long time of chatting it up on twitter we saw her for two seconds at White Rock Mary but actually got to meet this weekend! Also, a shout out to Stacy it was SO good to meet you too and hope that we see you again soon..you know not just on twitter! 🙂