Zietz Family Happenings: Race Time!

A little over 12 weeks ago, Max and I began training for the ING Hartford Half Marathon. Last year, I was 9 months pregnant with Brayden, but Max ran the race as his first ever Half Marathon. I was so proud of the dedication he had in training, and he pulled in an awesome time for 1:49:02, which is awesome!

This year I decided to run the half and Max wanted to do it again too.

I wasn't really sure how it was going to go. I barely ran while I was pregnant with B, I had him in the fall so there wasn't a whole lot of going out with the kids in the stroller to run or even walk over the winter. When I first started running, it was tough to even get a 10 minute mile. I ran a 5k in April and it was tiring to get a sub-10-min mile! So I started a training program and with the exception of about 10 miles total, I stuck with it!

In a totally not prideful/obnoxious way, I'm very proud of myself. I worked hard to train and stick with it while working part-time and having two kids under two. I am so thankful for my super supportive husband who watched the kids on my long run days and even came home early a few days for my 5 mile runs:) I am very thankful for two kids who could handle running up to 4 miles with me, the rail trail near our house that made it easy to run with the kids even in the super hot weather of the summer, the random hills all over Trumbull that made my runs with and without a double jogger that much harder.

I had a goal when this all started of running a 2 hour race. As we started to do some longer runs, something clicked and I was doing well. I thought, I might actually be able to run faster than 2:00!

Race day was perfect-beautiful weather and perfect temperature. Max and I are obviously competitive with each other, especially because I had been beating some of his training times the few weeks before, so we didn't want to see each other at the start-easily done because there were almost 9,000 people starting that race, if not more. I had no clue if we started before me of behind me. The first two miles went by so fast, as I was just trying to weave in and out of people. Surprisingly, I ran the first 4-5 miles faster than I thought, and I was thinking I should slow down because I didn't know if I could handle it, but then I just decided to keep going and if I got tired then I'd slow down. At mile 11.5 I spotted Max up ahead. He had a foot injury going into this race so I wasn't sure how he was doing-I tapped his butt, saw he was in pain, told him not to be sneaky and sprint past me at the end, he said he was barely going to make it, and like the supportive sensitive wife that I am, I kept running:)

I ended up with a time of 1:45:57, which was 8:06 min/mile-something I was very surprised I was able to accomplish. This experience has gone to show me that we are capable of so much more than we can imagine.

Despite losing toenails, running 200 miles in training, getting who knows how many blisters, consuming way too much Gu, and having to get up way too early for long runs, I'm so thankful for this experience! Now on to the next race:)

I knew it was going to be a good weekend when we saw these guys on the way up!

Kinda a wasted weekend away with the whole specific dinner diet and early to bed thing, but I'll take it. (side note: we probably would have slept better at home thanks to the loud women next to us who came home at 2:30 and woke us both up for half hour!)