Finally

At the beautiful UC Riverside campus.

I have accomplished something recently that I'm very proud of.  My first 5K race.  That's 3.10 miles.  I haven't participated in a race since grade school, so when Kara suggested that we do this for "external motivation" I was hesitant. But with my 30th birthday looming this year I thought I'd try something other than selling myself short.  It worked, Kara worked for it and I worked for it.

This is the Before picture.  As in, Before we were red-faced and sweaty.

Mark was such a trooper.  He held the bags and rode herd on two young, rambunctious boys while we did our race and took pictures of us.  Thanks, Mark!

Waiting for the horn at the starting line.  (That's my creepy face.)

So the air horn all of a sudden goes off, startling us and the crowd pushes forward in high spirits like a herd of spooked cows.  Kara and I find this extremely amusing and are laughing for the first 5 minutes of the run.
I'd say we ran the majority of the race but there were hills.  Big hills.  So we walked up those.  But it was so fun and the campus was so pretty and I loved doing this challenge with my sister.  

This was just before the finish.

As we came close to the end we see Mark and Owen, and West waiting for us and we were walking a little so we could run the last bit and Owen says, "Mommy, you're supposed to be running!"  So we started running again.  Thanks for the motivation, Owen.

Yeah, I'm working that belly off.

That's Owen slapping his mom on the butt and I just got a low five from Scotty the Bear.

We did it!  We finished right behind a lovely 50-something lady at 46 minutes and I don't know how many seconds.  Plenty of room for improvement but I am so proud we ran most of it and finished in under an hour.  And I got to do something I've never done before with my bad ass sister.  And we got free shirts out of it.

The After picture.  Somewhat red-faced.

Much Running