Dallas Turkey Trot
November 23, 2011 by · 6 Comments
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Happy pre-Thanksgiving! To all of our readers who are traveling we wish you safe travel, and to those who get to stay put where you are – yay, so do we!!
And it’s for that very reason we get to participate in tomorrow’s 44th Dallas Turkey Trot. Not only are we going to participate as runners in the 8 mile race, but we will also be participating in setting a new Guinness World Record of the largest gathering of people dressed as turkeys! 🙂
Our turkey costumes are not completely finished (that’ll happen tonight), but with these pictures you can get the idea of just how we’ll look!
If you want to know exactly what we look like IN the costumes, well then, check back here on the blog with us tomorrow! 🙂
We ran the 8 mile at the Turkey Trot last year – Oh boy! What. a. mess. that was! We waited until the last minute to use the bathrooms and just quickly lined up. Then we dodged like we had never dodged before around groups of walkers and people with their dogs. Now there’s nothing wrong with walking or doing a race with your dog, but when you’re at a race and there’s no protocol for making it so people who are running it seriously can do just that….Well, I believe the great people who put on this race heard everyone’s cries last year because this year the timed runners get to start 5 minutes earlier!
Last year our results were –
Teal: 1:25:07
Beth: 1:14:23
Hopefully we can beat our old times tomorrow! Then we’ll be rushing home to get ready for our Thanksgiving celebration with each of our families!
The only downside to running the Turkey Trot is missing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but the mimosa’s afterwards should more than make up for that. 🙂
Three Going on Ten
November 22, 2011 by · 7 Comments
Three years ago today Michael and I “finally” got married! It’s weird to celebrate it in a way because it almost seems insignificant compared to the time we have actually been together. I met Michael in the 7th grade and we have always been attached in some way!
It's blurry but you get the idea!- 7th Grade
We have been through some crazy things, crazy styles, events, and ups and downs. Most of the time its life and we do what we can to make it the best for us! Not always pretty but always real!
I had the following quote read on my wedding day by my brother, who married us and I think it basically sums us up – here it is.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Happy Anniversary- Love you Michael- mmmmmmmmmmmmm
– Teal
The Other Parts of #RnRSA Weekend
November 18, 2011 by · 6 Comments
It’s probably a good thing that the two of us were the only ones traveling together to Austin/San Antonio because we might seriously annoy someone else. Ha. The plan was for Beth to head over to Teal’s and take off from there, well, then Beth had to run home first, and when she got to Teal’s house Teal was actually in the process of switching cable providers. Ha 🙂 Would you want to kill us right now if you were traveling with us?
Then we had to go pick up Teal’s #TeamCindy shirt, oh but first we stopped and got coffee! We both wake up so early all the time that we needed something to keep us awake during the drive besides our incessant chatting. After getting the shirt we decided to get dinner and why not just go ahead and sit down and eat while we are at it?? I think we were out of the door of Baker Brothers by like 7:15 and we hit the road! Would you want to kill us now?
Oh, wait, we need gas! Haha, we made it to Austin a little bit before 11:00 p.m. to our friend Mary Alice’s cute little house! Thanks again for letting us stay with you! We got all caught up on life and made it to bed right before midnight. Now that Teal joined Sunstone Yoga again we decided the perfect way to start our Saturday morning would be by attending a Fire 60 class, so off we went to yoga, shower, get breakfast and then pick Mary Alice up to head to San Antonio.
I’d say the highlight of our Saturday was lunch at The Cove! Not only because The Cove has some de-lish food (get the fish tacos and go ahead and get a side of sweet potato fries – you won’t regret it), but also because of the great company we had to dine with there! Beth was really excited because her cousin, Chase, was driving in from Houston to meet us and run the half with us!
Do you see any family resemblance?
Sadly that is the ONLY picture we took at The Cove, but we finally got to meet @UltraNinjaRunnr and @theASGwifey a.k.a. Greg and Fiona! Somehow we’ve all managed to not meet each other yet even though we live in the same metroplex, oh well, glad it finally happened! We met @RunDaTad a.k.a. Dat – somehow we missed that you didn’t live in DFW?? Ha, always just assumed that – silly us making assumptions! And a San Antonio local, @joeguinn who was going to be running his first full – hope it went well for you, Joe! AND we finally got to meet our tweep @Ohkaylouise a.k.a. Kristen who had come all the way from Sonoma, CA to run the half! We chat with Kristen a lot on twitter and send emails back and forth with her, so it was SO GREAT to get to meet you! Why did we not capture that moment on film? What is wrong with us? And of course we cannot leave out our fellow DFW tweeps that we’d already met before – @HeidiRuns & @bmlueb, @ciaobella7 & @reigning1 – you can constantly find us freaking out with the ladies of these awesome couples on twitter about our first marathon which is now 15 days away! We love to give them support and appreciate so much all the support they give us! Can’t wait until we are all marathoners!!
After lunch we hit the expo, got some fuel for the race and more importantly some cute headbands to wear. Here’s Teal modeling her’s even though she didn’t actually wear it during the half.
This is how you wear it, right?
After expo-ing we quickly checked into our hotel – SpringHill Suites by the airport and were quickly off to the grocery store for snacks since it had now been at least two hours since our last feeding. Haha Also, we’d highly recommend the SpringHill Suites, while yes it isn’t on the riverwalk in San Antonio it was still really nice and a great hotel! There are some other great parts to SA besides the riverwalk that are right there around that hotel! After snacking we made sure to get our plank of the day in and our 100 pushups.
Schwoops it's blurry, but we are just so fast with the pushups! Ha
After that we headed out for our final meal before the race with Chase and Mary Alice. We aren’t even going to go into the special-ness that occurred which led us to dining at Canyon Cafe for dinner. Just know it was special and not where we were originally going to go. 🙂 The three of us girls got the exact same thing so here is some food porn for you! [Sorry Mom we put the word porn in our blog!]
Behold the FIRE-GRILLED TUNA – Served over oven-roasted vegetables and Santa Fe rice. Topped with an avocado fan and chipotle mayonnaise. It was de-lish!
Just in case you missed our faces here we all are at dinner –
After dinner it was back to the hotel for all 3 of us girls to decide what exactly we were wearing in the morning, lay it out and have ridiculous conversations about our wake up time and leave time. I think every 20 minutes or so we pushed back our wake up time and leave time by 15 minutes and ultimately decided waking up at 4:30 a.m. and leaving the hotel by 5:00 a.m. would be just fine. Typical girls?
Want to give a quick shoutout to our friend, Zac (Mary Alice’s brother-in-law, in case you are trying to keep these people straight), for shaving more than 10 minutes off of his marathon time at the race! Here’s a picture of Zac and his lovely preggo wife, Rebekah after the race! Shoutout to Baby Girl Elliott coming December 2011! 🙂
Zac, Rebekah and baby girl Elliott!
After the race was over we met our friend Bitner at his hotel and together with him, the Elliotts and Mary Alice we went off to dine on Mexican food on the riverwalk! Once lunch was over we all went our separate ways. 🙁 We’ll be seeing Zac again at White Rock in December when he runs his 4th mary! Mary Alice and Bitner will also be running White Rock with us as their first marys ever just like us!
We dropped Mary Alice off and Austin a little bit before 5:00 p.m. and made our way over to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Umm, why do we not have one in Dallas? How can we make that happen? Again, de-lish! Thanks to one of us having an iPad we were able to easily participate in #runchat from the car on our way back to Dallas! Such a great trip even if it was tiring and we are still recovering sleep-wise!
November Race No. 2
November 15, 2011 by · 7 Comments
Well, we completed our 4th half of 2011 and 5th half overall this past weekend at Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio! So many of our running friends were out there too, but we’ll touch on everything we did when not racing in another post!
We were both REALLY excited for this race! We signed up for this half back in June and began our fundraising efforts for Team Cindy then. We spent 5 months talking about Cindy Marshall-Death in blog posts and tweets, and so many of you out there read her story and donated to us! Because so many people stood with us by donating and because Cindy’s story touches both of our lives this race meant A LOT to us!
We started the race day by waking up at 4:30 a.m. to drive to the shuttle bus pick up, but that ended up being a cluster and we ultimately parked for $18 (ahhh) by the start line. We ended up standing around basically for an hour and a half, but with friends so it was all good! We both ate peanut butter sandwiches around 6:30 a.m. and were already hungry by the time our corral started the race at 8:00 a.m.
Mary Alice, Teal, Chase, Beth & Bitner
Overall the beginning of the race was great. We seriously felt awesome! For Teal nothing was hurting, well besides her knee that does not like to stay in socket, but other than that all good. We kept a good pace to get across the finish in under 2 hours and that stayed until about mile 9. It was in those first 9 miles that we ran by a woman wearing a shirt that said “I kicked cancer’s butt twice” and both of us were on the verge of tears. It was shortly after that we began to hear spectators saying “Go Team Cindy,” and the first time we heard that the tears wanted to come again! Neither of us talked about this during the race, but did afterwards and discussed how we both had to get it together to keep going. Also, Rock ‘n’ Roll – why do you not put names on people’s bibs?? It would make it SO much easier for the spectators to cheer us ALL on!
Us waiting patiently in our corral - notice the straws?? And our ribbons with all of our donators names written on them?
During those first 9 miles we basically moved in and out from people pretty easily but it was annoying and slightly exhausting. We did fairly well for the water stops. Teal had decided to carry a straw this race because she wanted to run sans camelbak and Beth thought she’d try it out with her. It seriously was awesome. We both just tucked the straw in our sports bras. Teal just took it out when she needed water – wish we could have somehow gotten a picture of her running and drinking out of her straw at the same time. People probably thought she was nuts, but it’s better than choking! Beth never actually used the straw and just crunched up the cup to get the water and keep up with the running.
Teal – At about mile 9, I lost my patience and let the annoyance get to me. I ended up stuck behind people at the water stop, the roads had narrowed a bunch, the crowd at points was in the run path and I was like, GET AWAY, I slowed down, I had felt at this point that Beth was running faster than me and I didn’t feel like I could keep up so I slowed down a little.
Beth – It was at a water stop in mile 9 that Teal and I got really separated for the first time. We were doing some serious dodging at that specific water stop more than any other. It was around this time that I knew I was teetering a fine line of making it less than 2 hours and just barely missing the goal, so I knew I had to step it up a little bit just to be on the safe side. I kept thinking about how people would yell for Team Cindy and I’d responded with “Thank you” and send them a smile – did I have more in me and I wasn’t pushing hard enough?
Teal – I ran mile 10 about 30 seconds slower than the previous 10 miles. The last 3 basically sucked in my opinion. I thought I would still make it under 2 hours even with the 30 second slower pace because my Runkeeper kept saying a pace that I knew would make it under 2 and at mile 12.05 (yes I remember it because I was like under a mile) it said I had like 10 minutes and something seconds to make it to the finish under 2 hours and that my current pace would get me there in time. I picked it up a little but was sure I would make it.
Beth – I was keeping my pace pretty consist around 9:00 minute miles and I would say the last 3 miles were hard! I don’t remember there being much shade and it had gotten HOT and HUMID! Somewhere in mile 10, I believe, I saw our friend, Heidi, and she asked me if I was on target for finishing sub 2:00. I told her I thought I was and she told me to go get it! Appreciated that encouragement right then! Thanks, Heidi! 🙂 When I got to the 11 mile marker I knew I had roughly 20 minutes left before two hours. I just kept telling myself you are running 9 minute miles, you got this, keep it up! Don’t give up now when you are so close. And honestly I never felt like I wanted to stop or give up. Was it hard? Yes, but I was determined and hungry for the sub 2:00.
The last part of the race before you turn and haul to cross that finish line was freaking uphill! Pretty sure we both saw that and just thought you have got to be kidding me! Don’t worry we made sure to take a picture at the end of the race so those of you who weren’t there could see just what this hill looked like.
This one is kind of dark, but hopefully you can get the idea!
Teal – I picked it up a little but was sure I would make it. As I was running up the last hill the stupid 2 hour time sounded in my ear from Runkeeper and I was literally in sight of the finish. Slightly pissed I crossed the line and turned off my timer. 2:01:15. I thought well maybe just maybe my timer was off and I didn’t know the official time. I found out a few minutes later because our dear twitter friend Betsy (@WarriorBetsy), was tracking Beth and I and she tweeted our finish times- 2:00.56. Initially bummed, but a PR is a PR. I ran that race the fastest I have ever run a half-marathon. It was hot, humid, crowded, and slightly stinky and I still ran it the fastest ever. Oh and I learned something knew about my runkeeper that I feel dumb for not getting before, but it doesn’t tell the current pace- or at least I am not set on that, so my final 3 miles were actually too slow to make it, but my updates confused me and I still thought I was fin. Live and learn! When I got over it I was super proud of both of us- I am impressed by Beth who was able to get it under 2 hours and super close to her PR, we are definitely stronger than we were when we started all this! Oh and plus, I will have another ½ this year to get in under 2 hours—New Years Double – ekkkk I said it, but first, 3 weeks to the marathon!
Beth – When I crossed the finish line I knew I had to have made it! It might have been barely, but I knew it! I couldn’t get my Runkeeper turned off because 1. I’d needed to go the bathroom (no. 1 only people) since right before the race started and was so focused on getting to a port-a-potty [Sorry mom if you are reading this :)] and 2. I’d turned down the brightness on my iPhone so low to save battery power I couldn’t even see the screen with how bright the sun was. It was a good 15 minutes later I found out from Betsy what my time was! 1:58:46! But then looking at the official results yesterday they had me clocked at 1:58:47 – oh my, a whole second longer! Haha 🙂
That was a hard race! We are both VERY proud of what we accomplished out there. We ran smart races! We drank water, we fueled up a little after the one hour mark of running, and we only pushed ourselves to what our limits where for that day given the temperature and the humidity! We are proud of our friends who were out there with us! It was a hard race and no matter what crossing that finish line was a big feat! So congrats to each and every one of you!
Thank you to Betsy for tracking us and keeping others updated on where we were! It was so cool to see your tweets after the race! Thank you!
White Rock Marathon or BUST!!
Results:
Teal – 2:00:56, a new PR!! Finished 3,074th overall, 1,055th out of all the females and 209th in age group
Beth – 1:58:47, finished 2,710th overall, 890th out of all the females and 177 in age group
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!
November 14, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Happy Monday, y’all!! We made it back safely from our Rock ‘n’ Roll Half in San Antonio last night! We just want to once again thank everyone who donated to us over the past five months! Words cannot express how much we appreciate you and are thankful for your generosity! And we thought of y’all every step of our race on Sunday! We got ribbon and wrote everyone’s name that donated on the ribbon and wore them in our hair during the race –
So thank you for not only donating but also being a source of inspiration for us as we ran in memory of Cindy on Sunday!
THANK YOU!!!!
Now the moment you have been waiting for – who will be the winners of the following prizes??? —
First Prize
– a $30 gift certificate to Go Sport ID
– a pair of Tommie Copper Compression Sleeves
– a six pack of GU Energy Gels that we are throwing in to the mix
Second Prize
– a $30 gift certificate to Go Sport ID
– your choice of a Tommie Copper Hat or Beanie
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JRoBeJMZI]
CONGRATS to our WINNERS!! 🙂 We will be in contact with you soon so we can get your prizes to you!
Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio
November 11, 2011 by · 3 Comments
It’s here!! The race we signed up for and started fundraising for in June is FINALLY HERE!!
After work today we are headed out to Austin to spend the night with our friend, Mary Alice, who is also running the half with us on Sunday! We’ll get up early Saturday morning and hit a yoga class before making our way down to San Antonio! If you didn’t see our blog yesterday – we’ve thrown together a last minute lunch at noon at The Cove. If you are going to be down in San Antonio for the race or just down there please come join us and RSVP here so we’ll know how many are coming! We’ll be wearing our Go Sport ID shirts, so if you don’t feel like you’ll recognize us then here we are in them from our Disneyland Half earlier this year –
Maybe we’ll take a new picture in our Go Sport ID shirts that has less of the wind blown hair look!
Y’all!! We can’t tell you how excited we are for this weekend!! As of November 9th we hit our $1,200 fundraising for Team Cindy and breast cancer goal!! Thanks so much to every single one of you that have donated even those of you who have continued to donate past hitting our goal! We’ll just go ahead and say it again – it is SUCH an honor to be running in memory of Cindy Marshall-Death and each and everyone of you who have donated will be running in spirit with us if you are not actually running the race! We are so grateful to the generosity of real life friends, friends we’ve made on twitter, friends we’ve made on twitter and then met in real life! 🙂 With that said – we do still have our Pink Donation Raffle going for a chance to win wonderful products from the fabulous Tommie Copper and Go Sport ID companies! We will be announcing our winners on Monday! So don’t miss our Monday morning post!
This weekend while we are in San Antonio, Cindy’s youngest daughter, Cynthia who is pregnant with Baby Cindy is having a baby shower! Beth is sad to missing out on that event, but if she has to miss it what better reason is there than to be running for Baby Cindy’s Mammy!
As far as the race goes here is what we are looking in elevation-
We are SO elevation spoiled in Texas!
Goals:
We are both very scared to even put down the true goals in our head for this weekend! What if we can’t do it?? We both are looking for a sub 2 hour half this weekend! There we said it! Beth got on with her very first half and hasn’t seen one since. Teal’s half PR sits SO close at a 2:01:36. If all goes right with the start and our corrals hopefully we can achieve this goal. I’m pretty sure you will all still be our friends even if we don’t go sub 2 hours, but we WANT IT! This race means so much to us that it would just be the icing on the cake!
Weather:
Low: 61*
High: 76*
Wind: 6MPH
Precip.: 0%
#RnRSA Saturday Lunch!
November 10, 2011 by · 5 Comments
Ok, our fellow Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio running tweeps!! Let’s have lunch together on Saturday at The Cove!
606 W. Cypress
San Antonio, Texas
It’s less than 4 miles from the Alamodome if you are going to be coming from the expo or going to the expo after (which is what we’ll probably do).
I’m just going to throw 12:00 p.m. out there as a lunch time and you can comment if you think it should be a different time!
Can’t wait to meet those of you that we haven’t met yet!
Also, feel free to comment and let us know if you plan to come so we can get a count for a table!
November Race No. 1
November 8, 2011 by · 7 Comments
Ok so we admit, we might have had ulterior motives for Sunday’s race, at least a little bit, and it seems more justified after our brief conversation with Racing it Off, but really, who doesn’t want a little race bling for completing long runs? As you know we both decided it would be an awesome idea to sign up for the DRC ½ on Sunday after a little convincing from Heidi. Beth’s convo to Teal was like –
“So, how do you feel about running the DRC Sunday?”
“Lets do it!”
“Great ok I’ll sign us up at lunch!”
Bling & a long run- not a bad deal not to mention good practice with running around the lake.!
So anyways, we’re sure you want some of the race recap! We set out Sunday at around 6:30- feeling well rested given the extra hour of sleep and headed to White Rock Lake. Neither of us had nerves for the race but rather nerves for the fact that we wanted to run 22 miles Sunday and make that our last official super long run for our training. Neither of us wanted to die and we had just come off a rather good 20 miler the week before! We got to the race and waited in the bathroom line forever – Caught up on race stuff, life and even tried to convince a lady and her hubby to sign up for the New Year’s Double!
Right before the race we met up with some fellow Twitter friends and wished our friend Heidi good luck – she wanted to PR! We got to meet a new twitter friend April! We lined up and we were off. The race started out almost exactly like Too Hot to Handle was and Teal had to remind Beth to not go the wrong way… see this post if you’re not sure what we are talking about. 😉 The beginning of the race was very tight, there were tons of us jumbled into to a fairly narrow space and it was like that for a good 3 miles. At one point you basically had to walk to get through parts, which is slightly a pain. We managed to stay at a good pace considering and stayed pretty much under 10 minutes a mile given we were going to run for 22. The rest of the race wasn’t bad. The hills were there a little bit between mile 4 and 7ish but it’s not THAT bad. The stations were awesome as usual and one guy was even handing out Oreos! We saw him too late and were both slightly bummed. Cookies sound really good during a race for some reason. We also had to keep a watch out for the dude in front of us who kept blowing snot rockets! Seriously?? It’s gross! We wondered if that just gets worse with the weather.
Teal, Heidi & Beth
We both kept counting down to each other with every mile we passed. Only 13 more, 12 more, 11 more..you get the point. Both of us felt pretty good overall, Teal mentioned slight pain in her booty – stupid hills, but other than that not bad at all. We got down to about 1.5 miles left and separated a little bit. Teal wasn’t quite sure what was happening but Beth knew we were close and could finish the race under 2:10 so she picked it up a little. Teal was just in her own little world and was like —we’ve got 10 left – I am not moving any faster than I am now. We both finished and really did not want to keep running. We got our race bling and hung around to chat with Heidi and her hubby, Brian. Ran into Michelle again – love how many races we see you at!! We ate, sat for a while and decided we would pick up our extra 9 miles at home. We figured that we would be ok if we ran the rest on tired legs the same day given that we did already complete the longest run on our schedule.
New bling ....and checkout that Go Sport ID on the wrist!
After leaving we went home, charged our phones, ate a little more and then headed back out for 9 more miles. Sure enough it felt as if we hadn’t actually stopped. It got hotter outside which was annoying, we were both still in pants, tired and really our minds were kind of done with racing for the day. We had looked at wedding stuff and talked with Beth’s sister, Kate for a while and really we weren’t in the best run moods, but we knew we wanted to get this in! We set out at about the same pace and ran 4.5 out and then back around our normal training route. We managed to get in the full 22 and really after we started it wasn’t that bad. Our legs felt the extra miles but overall not too bad. Teal went home and soaked in the tub and had to switch off legs with her Tommie Cooper calf sleeves- it appears as if her dog, Wilson, has run off with one of them and Beth of course did the same but with both sleeves! We feel prepared for White Rock and have a little more confidence that 26.2 is doable! It’s just 4 more? Right!!??
We set out this coming weekend for Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio and are super excited about that trip. More to come about that race this week!! We seriously are super excited!!