Houston (Half) Marathon

I have run quite a few half marathons. After this past weekend, the exact number is 7. I have run in Surfside, Dallas, Galveston, New Orleans, Las Colinas, and San Antonio but had not yet run in Houston. Well, I decided this year to try the half in Houston and I loved it! Look at the sweet sign one of the kinder moms made and had my kids sign! Love them!

Saturday, Carolina and I headed down to George R. Brown. We picked up our packets, explored the expo and then got to watch the end of the Olympic marathon trials! So cool! We saw Meb Keflezighi, Ryan Hall and Abdi Abdirahman clench spots on the Olympic team for the men and Shalane Flanagan, Desiree Davila and Kara Goucher claim spots for the women. What an amazing thing to watch!!

Later that day, my mom came into town and we did a little shopping, attended a wedding shower and went to see New Year's Eve (such a good movie!) before eating a pasta dinner and calling it an early night.

Sunday we were up by 4:45 (no lie..) and headed out to meet Carolina to drive downtown. Carolina and I before our 5th half marathon together.

This was a HUGE race, but was so well organized! I loved getting to see all of the fun signs and the crowd support was amazing! It definitely made a difference in my running. As did the perfect weather conditions. I beat my previous times and finished in 1:50:25 (which beat my last race in San Antonio, that was a hot and hard race for me, by 8 minutes!).

I'm on the far right just about the cross the finish line

My official time said 1:50:25..I either started my watch too early or stopped it too late

After finishing the race, Abdi Abdirahman (remember the 3rd place finisher in the Olympic trials) moseyed by in his official Olympic team jacket, so we chased him down for a picture! : ) (Yes that is a starbucks in my hand. I was so jealous of all of the spectators that had starbucks along the way, so I had to get one right after we finished...love my Skinny Vanilla Lattes!)

We went to mile 22 to support our friends Lauren (who rocked the full marathon in 4:03!!)
and Warren
and ended up seeing even more people we knew to cheer on. What amazing runners they are!! I cannot imagine (nor do I have any desire to find out) how hard those last 13.1 miles are!

We were starving at that point, so we drove around looking for a place to eat lunch and happened upon District 7 Grill where we enjoyed a wonderful brunch of egg sandwiches, migas and waffles..we had to refuel. : )

And to top off the great weekend, I'm off from school today due to MLKJ!