Long Runs

In our running group, we always do our long runs on Saturday mornings. I've attended every single one up until last weekend. I had the GOTR race last Saturday. I was going to do both when I thought the race started at 9am, but it started at 830a and I wouldn't have had time to make it their in time. Then I also missed yesterday.

Kate, Kara, and I at the concert

Kate's AWESOME photo of Mr. Church

Friday night we (Kara, Kate, and Kate's husband) went to Topeka to see Eric Church in concert. It was originally going to be Kim and her boyfriend Kevin instead of Kara and I, but Kevin couldn't go, so Kim invited me to go, then Kim got sick and we asked Kara to go. It was kind of a big fiasco because we all work together and we were needing to leave work early and then Stephanie called in sick. But we ended up making it work. Well, we didn't get home until about 2am and I didn't get to bed until even later. So, waking up to be running at 7am then working after wasn't going to happen.

On a side note, the expo center the concert was in had a bunch of stairs that we had to go up. In my old life, I would've looked at those stairs with dread, but now, I looked at them with excitement! I ran up those stairs and I wasn't even out of breath when I got to the top!

Anyway... When Kim got to work on Saturday, I asked her if she had run with the group and she said that she hadn't, so I asked her if she wanted to run tomorrow (which is now, today) and she said she did. So we made plans to meet Sunday at 7am. We met up for our 60 minute run and we ran the outside perimeter of the park, which we never do. I really liked it! We started our run next to the zoo and you could hear the animals in there going crazy! It must have been breakfast time! When we got about half way, I needed to walk for about 10 seconds, and then we were back to running.

At one point in the middle of the path we saw a turtle! It was so cute! Kim said "There, now it feels like we're going fast!" We also saw a beautiful butterfly fluttering around! I love seeing stuff like that while running! We got back around and crossed the wooden bridge to get back to the park and we realized we were not at 60 minutes yet, so we did the small loop and ended at 62:35 and we did 4.49 miles! It felt great! It really gave me confidence in our 10k that is now less than 2 weeks away!

It was also my first run with my Garmin and I loooove it!

Paul is changing the brakes on my car right now and afterwards I think I'm going to take Elliott to the zoo! It's so nice out and we need to renew our membership anyway. She is finally at an age where she will really enjoy it! She loves looking at her animal flash cards and making all the animal sounds!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

A shout out to Karen who ran her first 5k yesterday, Jen who is also doing a 5k today, and Katie who is running her first marathon today! You ladies are great!