Sunday, April 21, 2013

Salt Lake Marathon

Chris and I ran the Salt Lake marathon on Saturday. It was the second marathon for both of us and we trained really hard for it, so we both thought we were going to do well. The goal was to finish in under 4 hours and to finish together because we had never done that before, he couldn't finish my first marathon because his knees gave out on him and I couldn't finish his first marathon because I was injured at the time. So we prepared as best we could. We couldn't have predicted that it would rain pretty hard on us for the first 13 miles or so, but that was only a slight deterrent and we were feeling pretty good as we ran. We saw several friends along the way, both running and supporting along the sidelines. We ended up running the race in just over 4 hours, 4:00:36 to be precise, but that's so close that I don't feel like we failed in our mission. One of the better things about this race as opposed to the other marathon I did was the fact that I'm not nearly as sore as I was after finishing the other race. I could actually make it up and down the stairs afterward with minimal pain. So all in all I feel good about my second marathon and am actually looking forward to the next one.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Boston

This past Monday was the Boston Marathon. Chris' mom qualified a while ago, so we all decided to go to Boston to cheer her on. So we made a weekend of it. We went to a Red Sox game and walked the freedom trail, and drove down the coast to Plymouth Rock, which is much smaller than it sounds by the way. Then on Monday we watched the marathon. It was one of the coolest things ever and I really, really want to run it one day. Anyway, Mary finished running the marathon in a time of 3 hours and 56 minutes which was amazing. So we walked over to the area where families wait for their runners. As we were walking over, we heard two loud booms. We didn't know what it was, so we called Chris' brothers who were at the hotel and asked them to turn on the tv to find out what was going on. They told us that two bombs had been set off at the finish line of the race. We frantically searched for Mary, wondering if she was okay. We found her and went back to our hotel, which was only a block away from where the bombs had gone off and watched the news. Since our hotel was so close to the bombs, the police had locked down our hotel and wouldn't let anyone in or out. So we sat in our hotel room and watched the news unfold, saw how many people had been hurt and saw that three people had been killed and we realized that we were really lucky to all be safe and we felt for the families who were suffering. We also watched out our window and saw tons of cops with bomb sniffing dogs go all over the streets. They called in the National Guard and the next day they let us out of the hotel, but there were soldiers outside every hotel with guns. It was actually really scary, but thankfully we were all safe. As we went through security at the airport, a cop came up to us and asked us if we had been at the marathon, if we had taken any pictures and if he could see them. We showed him our pictures and then he asked if we would email them to him because we were right across the street from where one of the bombs had gone off about 10 minutes before they exploded. It was crazy and kind of surreal. Our hearts go out to all those families who were not as lucky as us.