the other half

today i ran my first half marathon. it was the other half marathon in moab. my goal was to finish the race in under 2 hours and 30 minutes! i beat my goal time by 24 minutes! i was soo impressed. my mom and kayla ran it as well and kayla's goal was to beat my mom! she did it, her time was 2 hours and 29 minutes. my mom's goal was to beat 3 hours and she did it as well! she finished in 2 hours and 45 minutes. it was awesome, i was so proud of all of us. it was all our first time running a half marathon and we all did a lot better then we imagined.
we started out the race at 8:30 and kayla and i stayed together for about the first 2 miles then she fell behind a little bit. every 2 miles there was a water station where the helpers handed us water and gatorade and i never stopped running so i spilled all over myself. the first 7 miles were pretty much flat, but once we hit mile 7 it was hills until the middle of mile 11. it was kinda rough but i only stopped running for about 1 minute and walked up the very last hill. at mile 8 my ankle was KILLING me but i just kinda pretended it wasn't and kept running. the scenery was amazing as well. the sun was hitting the red rock cliffs so perfectly that the colors showed so vividly and we were right next to a river as well so the tree's surrounded it were gorgeous. it really was such a perfect day, the weather never got too hot and it was overcast for a little while so i never felt like i was overheating. i had so much fun doing this half marathon i cant wait to sign up for another one and try to improve my time! i placed 684th out of 2000 runners and 18th in my age category out of 60 females. i was also the 332 female to cross the line and my exact chip time was 2:06:56.