30DoB - Day 14 - My First 5K!!!

Today I ran my first 5K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, so walked a bit of it.  Whenever we were going uphill, I would walk (except one time when an uphill immediately followed a downhill, so I was able to use that momentum to keep on going!).  The total time for my first 5K was just under 40 minutes, and that counts stopping for a picture once and stopping for a small cup of hot cocoa.  :-)

I call it a huge success!  I really enjoyed this race.  EVERYONE did.  There wasn't a bad mood in the crowd.

Since this was my first race, I have to ask:  Are runners just happy people?  Or was this just because of the fun theme?

In case you couldn't tell by my cousin Jena's and my outfits, this was an Ugly Christmas Sweater Run.  It was a lot of fun.   There were some crazy outfits!  Our looks were relatively tame compared to all of the tutus and reindeer costumes....  I loved it.

There were about 3000 people running!  That's a lot of runners.  It got very crowded, and because of that there was no pressure to run fast, which worked out great for me.  I don't think I'd been running since before Mom died, so this felt great.

I did wish that I could have called Mom about this, because she would have been so proud of me!

All in all, I think that 3.1 miles is very doable for a beginning runner like myself.  I walked up the hills, but otherwise I mostly jogged at a comfortable pace.  I passed some folks, and some folks passed me.  It was very relaxed and judgement free.  I am so glad that I chose such a fun race as my first 5K.

I'm already researching where the next 5K will be...

Sidenote:  Stacey took this picture of me without my knowing it! 

I don't think that I'm as HUGE as I picture myself.  But I do have some work to do!  My newest goal is to be back to a healthy size by next year's Ugly Sweater Run!  Then I can have some real fun comparing pictures.  :-)

 Anyway, I know that the point of my 30 Days of Blogging was to be done in 30 days, but that is sooooooooo not happening.  Still, it has got me back into the spirit of blogging, and I plan to try to blog as often as I can and get the second half of this blogging challenge done by 2013!