Terror Trail Run!

As many of you know, I set a goal for myself this year to complete a 5K, 10K, 1/2 Marathon and Marathon by January of 2011. The goal was set to help me lose my baby weight and teach me how to be consistent. Well, I'm happy to announce that on Saturday I checked off the first part of my goal. Kevin, Jennie and I ran the Terror Trail Run. It was a 4 mile race because I couldn't find a 5K and it was on some pretty Utahish trails which made it harder than I anticipated, but I did it an I had FUN!


Here we all are in the car on the way to the Oswego forest preserve. Jennie was nervous to run on her sprained ankle...I was nervous to run the longest distance I've ever done..Kevin was just pretending to be nervous because he is Kevin!


We had to park at a golf course and then they bused us to the forest preserve because there was no where to park there. Our first bus driver was NOT a warm fuzzy! ...but the next one was!


Here we are with the running Santa at the start of the race. I think he is only one of 3 people I passed along the way. Everyone was kind of scared of him, but I talked to him later and he was pretty nice.

When we got off the dirt road and on to the trails I was a little surprised! It looked a lot like the Stewart Falls hike in Utah and had a lot more hills than I'm used to seeing out here. They also had random "scary" spots set up along the way with bloody clothes and scary masks and axes...that sort of stuff. It was more cute than scary but I thought it was great still!


We had a pretty good system down. Jennie ran in front of me and kept me going at a good pace, and Kevin ran behind me and told stories to distract me from thinking I was CRAZY for doing this in the first place. Occasionally Kevin would run around taking pictures too!


Here Jennie is running backward to stretch out the muscles that were tightening from running on a sprained ankle. She was such a good sport, and besides an occasional gimpy wobble, you never would have known she was running with an injury!


Just as I was feeling like I didn't want to run anymore, we rounded a corner and BLAMMO! There was the finish! It really snuck up on me but I happily ran through and grabbed a drink of water to celebrate my first victory in running!


I finished in 46 minutes and I think 35 seconds. I know its slow but it was actually a record for me. When I did a test run at this distance on the treadmill I ran it in 50 minutes. So I think 46 minutes on rolling hills was pretty good. :)

Here I am enjoying my post race high. I was pretty proud of myself for finishing and very grateful that Kevin and Jennie were there to support me with my goal!


The park was SO beautiful which made the run a lot more exciting. This is Jennie and me standing in front of some pretty flowers and trying to capture the beauty after the race.


Kevin, me, and Jennie right after we finished. Some nice girls that we kept leap frogging took the picture for us.

After all was said and done, they bused us back to the golf course where we got a new pair of pants and some good grub. They actually had quite a bit of food and they played scary movies while we were eating. Definitely a fun race and now I can't wait to run a 10K in 8 weeks! Wish me luck!