I did it!!!

I ran with a pace of 10:18 mile.  Which is not my best by any means... My best is around an 8 minute mile, but that was for a 5K, so I wasn't expecting that at all.  Ten minutes is a decent mile pace!!
It hurt... there were so many hills (I mean, it was a marathon in the Blue Hills near Boston, I guess I should have expected it!)
I'm sore tonight, but it was incredible!!!
I cried a few times during the race, just in disbelief that I was actually running that distance and running a HALF MARATHON!!!

This was taken at 4:30am just before leaving the house.... The race began at 6:13am!



















This one was minutes after I finished...  I wont lie, I was a little nauseous, but I was so happy to be done!

These are my friend that I ran with.  The one in the hat is Erin, my newest Bestie!! She's the one who talked me into this whole thing!!  The one with the sunglasses is Crystal, she's wonderful and I just met her today!! But I felt like I knew her because she's Erin's best friend so we know of each other.  Crystal and my pace was exactly the same, so we kept each other running... and pretty much faster than either of us wanted, but as long as the other one was running, we kept going!
The one in the pink is a former resident of mine, but really good friends with Erin.  I feel like we were all friends, and really, after you go through something like this together, you are!















And these are RDs that I work with!  (Erin, from above!) and Mike.  He is not a runner but decided he could certainly walk it, at a pretty fast pace!  And he did!!

















We all did so great!!

So, I'll go into full detail at some point.  I will tell you that I felt incredible the whole race.  Until mile 10.  I got the worst cramp I've ever felt at mile 10 and I did not think it would go away.  But, I kept praying to God to take it away and finally, after about a full mile of running with it, it went away.  (Thank you God!)
I prayed a lot on this race!  I took the advice of a blogger who ran a full marathon and said that she dedicated each mile to a person and then she prayed for that person through the whole mile.  That is a lot tougher than you think!! But I did it.  I prayed a lot for my dad (I'll update on that again too!)... a lot of thankful prayers!!

Ok, I NEED to go to bed!  More later!!!