Someone Hold Us We’re Running a Half This Weekend

August 10, 2012 by · 9 Comments

That’s right if you’ll remember from our little countdown a week ago we are in fact running the Hottest Half on Sunday!

This week we’ve discussed the race and how we will survive it plan to cross that finish line together.  Once again being us, we were totally in sync with each other.  Are you sickened by our ability to be like that? Running partner match made in heaven!  On a side note, can we tell you how hard it is to NOT type NSYNC whenever we talk about how in sync we are?

Anyway, we also recently let you in on how our running has been not so excellent lately so we are enacting a run/walk strategy into this weekend’s half marathon.  We both are not big fans of the run/walking because our racing legs just don’t do so well with that method. (disclaimer: if you do that method we ain’t judgin’, you might cross a finish line faster than us doing it, but it’s just not OUR preferred method – that’s it! Promise)

We have no time goals for this race although in the back of our minds we’d both like it to be faster than our ZOOMA half times.  Thankfully the high on Sunday is only 99, no triple digits! Haha

Maybe you sense the dread in our posts about running such a hot half marathon and wonder why are you running it?  It’s the bling!  You see we signed up for the Four Seasons challenge and this is race 2 out of 4.  We crossed off spring half marathon with Big D Half and hopefully this weekend we’ll be crossing off summer half!

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ZOOMA Zoom Zoom & a Boom Boom!

April 4, 2012 by · 9 Comments

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….

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And the Winner Is….

April 2, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Sooooo we kind of forgot to remind people to enter our giveaway over the weekend since we were down in Austin for the ZOOMA half marathon.  Oops? But better odds for the ladies who did enter it for sure!

Drumroll please….

Congrats to Marla a.k.a. @coolmomof4js, you are our GlitzBandz winner!  We know you’ll love your GlitzBandz as much as we love our’s!

Shoot us an email lifeisarun2011 at gmail dot com and we’ll tell you how you can claim your GlitzBandz prize!

We’ll be back tomorrow with Aprils goals, so see you there! Have a great Monday, everyone! 🙂

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Three Things Thursday [Ladies Themed]

March 22, 2012 by · 5 Comments

Sorry to the dudes…this is geared more towards the ladies! BUT you can still read if you would like! 🙂

1.  In two days we are running the Kacie’s Run 5K, in three days we are running Dallas Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon AND in nine days we’ll be running the ZOOMA half marathon in Austin!! Like how we snuck three things into this one thing? We’re awesome like that!

2.  For our Dallas area people – come join us and some amazing vendors at this Girls Night Out! Event!  If you are coming PLEASE let us know!! 🙂

If you’ve been meaning to find a Scentsy person – there will be one there!

If you’ve been meaning to buy one of those cute no-slip headbands you see other ladies wearing at races – GlitzBandz will be there!

If you’ve been meaning to buy a new chicklit book – self published author, Kate O Lynch will be there!

If you’ve been meaning to get cute new jewelry – Melissa Vest will be there selling her handcrafted jewelry!

If you’ve been meaning to checkout a new line of skincare products – 3000BC will be there!

There will be little of something for everyone there plus a door prize and who doesn’t love wine?

3.  In keeping with the about the ladies theme of this post..check back with us on Monday as we have a GIVEAWAY coming!

Happy pre-Friday, friends! 🙂

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Austin, 3M Volunteering & Weekend of Good People!

January 31, 2012 by · 4 Comments

Ok, so we left you with our “Seven Things Friday” and we figured to recap our weekend we’d let you see how we did on those seven things, so here goes.

1. We are going to AUSTIN today after work!! Wheee!

Well we did and we made it back safe & sound!  Though we are still trying to work on the whole teleportation thing so we don’t have to endure the hours in the car!

2.  So that we can volunteer at the 3M Half Marathon!

We had two volunteer shifts over the weekend and our first was Saturday working packet pickup.  We walked in and were immediately put behind computers next to each other to help check people in.  Those 4 hours fa-lew by!  So many happy runners coming to pickup their bib, chip and awesome swag bag!

It was so sad hearing stories of people who thought they were registered for the race, but their registration really did not go through or they thought they’d still be able to get a spot, but it was sold out.  Definitely a lesson in registering ASAP and double checking your confirmation!

Then we were up bright & early race day morning to help pass out medals.  Along with other volunteers, we unwrapped 6,000 medals for the half & half relay which took about an hour and a half or so.

We had good timing because the first person to finish came in completing his half right around 1:07.  The 1:40 to 2:15 finish time frame was the when the BIG rush came in.  It was awesome!  Seeing the finishers’ faces and being able to congratulate them!  Some people were so excited that they even asked Teal if it was time for a smooch.  Then there were tamer moments like when Beth put a medal around a man’s neck and he wrapped his arms (stinky, sweaty and all) around her for a hug.

The whole time we were looking for our friends who were out there running to finish.  Our first familiar face was from C-Stand [we can’t stop calling you that :)]!!

Pretty positive it was those crazy pants that gave her a kick ass (sorry mom, we used the a word) PR!! Way to go lady! 😉  But really, Courtney, you killed it out there WAY TO GO for real!

Just a few minutes later in came Courtney a.k.a. @cisforcourtney who was easily spotted by us in her purple tank, Teal  yelled out to her and she came running over to us!  It was so cool to put that shiny medal around her neck!  You’ll have to check out her bloggy blog to see how awesome her PR was!

We also got to see and medal Lesley (@RacingItOff) and Tricia (@TriciaRunning) after their beer race 🙂  You ladies awesome! We have managed to see Lesley at a handful of races in Dallas, but it’s never for thaaat long. We have got to fix that!

We should mention we saw a couple of familiar faces from New Years Double out there too! Each of us spoke to one of them briefly – other NYD runners would know him as the marathon winner of New Year’s Eve and her as the half marathon winner of both days!

It was neat to be there and see the entire spectrum of runners out there from an 11 year old boy running his first half to a 62 year old woman crossing off “run a half marathon” from her bucket list.  She was so proud of herself, as she should be, because she could tell her kids that run marathons she had completed a half marathon. LOVED that!  We were there to see the 30 year old first finisher cross the finish line to the 69 year old who was the person to run across that finish line and regardless of their time each of them had such a sense of accomplishment to them!  Just further proving running is really for anyone with a goal!  Such. A. Great. Experience!

3. We are SO excited to get to meet Courtney & Luke!

Obviously you know we saw Courtney at the end of her race, but we first got to FINALLY meet her and Luke during our packet pickup shift! Who doesn’t love meeting someone and being handed over de-licious goodness in the form of a s’mores cupcake??  We also got to hangout with them for a little bit Saturday night too at this cute bar – Dive Bar.  While it was fun to hang with them that night it was at a bar where it was hard to talk and all hear each other, so we were grateful for the opportunity to see them Sunday afternoon too at Austin Java!  Courtney & Luke, you two are awesome!  We loved getting to see you, spend time with you and we can’t wait for the next time!! 🙂

You two are wonderful and we WISH we lived in the same city as you guys!

4.  We are officially signed up for the ZOOMA Austin Half on March 31, 2012!!

Yep, we still are!! 🙂  THAT didn’t change over the weekend, so you should sign up if you STILL have not…AND we still have a coupon code good through TODAY!  You know you wanna!!

5.  Neither of us have actually run in Austin and you know what? We are going to change that this weekend!

OOPS!! Yah, we didn’t!! Wait, we saw a bunch of runners, does that count?? Guess we’ll change that when we run ZOOMA!

6.  We canNOT wait to get coffee at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – have been dreaming about it since our last trip to Austin!

Yep, we went there! TWICE!  One trip there we might have gotten more than one drink! 🙂  It is safe to say that we are also a fan of their breakfast food there! We would have made a third trip there but we cheated and went to Austin Java.  Brigid to answer you question the other day – when we go there Teal gets either a sugar free caramel latte or vanilla latte and Beth tends to stick with Hazelnut.  If we are remembering correcting all of their drinks with milk are made with non fat milk.  And now we are dreaming about them again…..

7.  We really wanted to post 27 things…

Aren’t you glad we didn’t post 27 things this time either?? 🙂

We also would like to say thank you to Mary Alice for once again letting us crash with you!  And thanks to Mandy & her cute little munchkin, Meranda for meeting us for dinner Saturday night!

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Seven Things Friday

January 27, 2012 by · 7 Comments

1. We are going to AUSTIN today after work!! Wheee!

2.  So that we can volunteer at the 3M Half Marathon!

(source)

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! 🙂

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New Things Friday!

January 6, 2012 by · 8 Comments

Happy Friday!! Well, we got a NEW header!  All thanks to Beth’s sister, Kate!!  What do you think??

Also, did you happen to notice earlier this week the appearance of a new button on our blog?? Right around this area —–>

 

We are SO happy to be able to tell you that we are ZOOMA Connectors for the 2012 Texas event which will be held in Austin on March 31, 2012!!

 

 

What is ZOOMA you ask? Well, it is a race series designed for women!  We all love girls weekends, right?  [well, all of us females at least :)]  ZOOMA has basically gone and created a girls weekend for runners!  You run your race and afterwards at the after party expo you are pampered with wine, massages, demos and shopping!  What else is cool about running their half marathon is each finisher gets an exclusively-designed piece of jewelry! We absolutely love the theme of the ZOOMA events:

run. laugh. celebrate.

The ZOOMA race series is really all about promoting a healthy & active lifestyle!  They really embrace that by finding Ambassadors in each city where a race is held to help train and inspire runners.  Their big kick off event for runners and Ambassadors to meet is actually tomorrow morning at the Luke’s Locker on Sandra Muraida Way, so if you are in Austin and want to participate go here to RSVP to the event!  There are a number of links on their site to inspire you and your training or just help you get started!

Ok, so we have really promoted this whole it’s a girls weekend aspect of the ZOOMA event, it really is just one big girls weekend, BUT men are welcome too!  So ladies if you want to run this race and your husband/significant other/brother/etc. is looking for a race to run too, well, bring him with you!

Registration is open NOW for the Austin, Texas event on March 31, 2012 and if you sign up before January 7, 2012 [tomorrow] you will beat the price increase!  The two of us will be heading down to Austin and running the half marathon portion of the event, so come and join us!

Sign up today and let us know that we will see you out there! 🙂

If you are one of our readers outside of the great state of Texas be sure to checkout the other 4 events in the ZOOMA race series and plan to make one of those!

Atlanta – April 22, 2012

Annapolis – June 2, 2012

Cape Cod – September 22, 2012

Great Lakes– October 20, 2012

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