Half Marathon- mission complete

This morning Kurt and I woke up to the daunting task of having to run a half marathon! 13.1 miles to be exact. The race was to begin at 7 am, we put on our Santa Clarita marathon shirts, our race numbers, our trackers on our shoes, and our shorts and off we went. When we arrived we thought we would see a ton of people since according to our clock it was 6:48 am. We forgot about daylight savings so we were quite early. I was freezing which isn't saying much because I get cold easily. We watched the crew of people set up to starting lines and speakers. We danced to some music and waited what felt like forever for the race to begin. I could not believe how many people were there, it was crazy!! They had a full marathon, a 5k, and a kids run all going on too.

First pic of the morning, freezing my bum off and in the middle of a sentence. Love it when Kurt snaps pictures while I'm talking...awesome.

AMPED to start the race!

The announcer gave instructions on where to go for your race, and when to start. He also had a funny little unexpected announcement of informing the crowd that they had a dance competition winner, which there never actually was a competition for. He said that this girl had been there all morning and was dancing and she didn't know it yet but they were watching her, so give a big round of applause for number 1965 winner of our dance competition!! Which just so happened to be.....ME! LOL!! I was laughing so hard and waved my hand around as he then proceeded to interview me in front of the mass amount of people. I curtsied upon winning and laughed it up with Kurt. As soon as he said dance competition I knew I was in trouble. If there's music I will dance come crowd or no crowd, rain or shine...lol.
Anyway onto our race, a cute little eleven yr old girl sang the national anthem which was awesome and then bang went to the gun and we were off!

Kurt ran ahead of me a bit to get a good pic of the start of the race. We stayed at a great pace and kept with each other as we chugged along. I was so impressed with the volunteers!! They had so many cute kids helping at the water checkpoints and everything was really well organized. Everything was going wonderfully, we were laughing and joking with other racers and having a good time. I was really nervous about this race because I still have injuries from my car accident and my legs tend to act up a ton. Nothing hurt until about mile 9 when my left knee (which has had trouble since before my car accident) started to feel it was going to give. I was kicking myself for not bringing my knee brace.

But I kept pushing anyway, I was cracking Kurt up by talking to my knee and telling it I did not give it permission to hurt and that it needed to stop now! lol. Kurt was awesome and I loved that he was my running partner! It was really nice to be able to accomplish this race together. We completed it and that's one goal crossed off my checklist! It felt great to run it and I think it would be awesome to do another one. As for the aftermath my knee still hurts but other than that we're great just in need of sleep. Time- 2:37