Mile 2: Chucked my throwaway shirt.
Mile 2.2: Realized I had to use the porta potty at the very first aid station which was annoying, but I wanted to be comfortable during the race and wasn't trying to PR or anything.

Mile 3: Ahhh. My feet and hands are FINALLY warm again.

Mile 6: Took a gel and started feeling a nagging pain in my left knee, like your run of the mill IT band thing. This usually happens on runs longer than 1 hour for me. More annoying than anything at this point. Got to appreciate the craftmanship of a truly masterful crocheted turkey hat.

Mile 9: Things slid downhill. I realized my hands had turned back into ice blocks, and with my medical condition, this is like an all-consuming pain as all blood leaves my hands and my body struggles to force bloodflow back down there. My water bottle that I brought with me must have started leaking onto my doubled-up cheap stretchy gloves from Target and the cold water just soaked in, but I didn't realize this for a while so didn't take off the gloves for fear of my hands getting even colder.

So, partly in tears because of the pain in my hands and frustration of my knee really starting to seize up at this point, I started walking and tried to warm up my hands on my body, wondering how on earth I was going to last another hour in this state. And then I saw Chris! It's like he *knew* I needed to see a friendly face at that point. He jogged along side me in the grass for about a mile, and I took my wet gloves off, handed him my water bottle and he gave me his giant brown gloves to finish the race in. As soon as I put them on, it felt like heaven and even though my knee was still hurting, that was the mental boost I needed. A photog was stationed right there and captured a pic of the two of us. I'm sure I'll look terrible in that pic, with a weird gait from the knee thing happening and giant man gloves, but I'm pretty sure I'll buy it because it meant everything to have him there at that moment, when I was ready to bag the race and seek shelter on the warm shuttle bus.

Buy real waterproof running gloves to go over my trusty cheap Target stretchy gloves. NOT carry a water bottle in freezing cold weather. I was just nervous to ditch it after I had done all of my long runs with it - I wanted to stick to "nothing new on race day" and I got stuck with ice blocks for hands instead.

I finished as "Born to Run" was playing and saw Chris mouthing and pantomiming the lyrics and cracked up. So at least my finish line photo will be of me smiling, haha.

Stretched as well as I could on a picnic bench, ate a couple bananas and some pretzels, and took some photos


The mental challenge of my hands around mile 9 really slowed me down for a while and took a lot of gas out of me just from dealing with the pain. The IT pain in my knee forced me to walk about half of the final 5K. Since the 10-miler had gone so well a couple of weeks ago, I didn't think adding the extra 3.1 would be *that* much more difficult, but it's interesting to see just how different your experience can be if you tweak a couple of other factors.


This was a small, very well organized race. Seemed perfectly supported, I liked that the 5K start and finish was held in a completely different location than the half to avoid congestion, and plenty of nice warm shuttle buses awaited us at the finish. Chris was able to get around handily on the shuttle buses as well. If I wasn't so cold and ready for a hot shower, I would have grabbed a free massage.