the worst pain ever...

someone should have told me that this was going to be so painful. wait a minute, i'm pretty sure everyone told me and i just flat out ignored them. running 26 miles sucks!! i've been through childbirth 3 times and it wasn't this bad! i may be all smiles in the pictures, but don't let it fool you, i'm in serious pain. the first picture is pretty crazy to look at, but it actually best represents how i felt the last 8 miles of the race...a complete blur.

i was so hoping for a better outcome that day. really, i trained for months and thought i was prepared for this, but apparently my old body was not ready or able to do what i wanted it to do. i had a goal of finishing this thing in about 4 1/2 hours...HA! my time was an entire HOUR after my goal time...REDONKULOUS!! i will never forget this image...

it was at this point that i realized i was defeated and couldn't run anymore. for the next hour and a half i was cussing San Diego for their slanted pot hole roads and damn beachy island i had to run on. i don't even remember what music i had on, i couldn't hear it over my whimpering and complaining. it was miserable, just miserable. it felt like some angry spectator had hit me in the shin with a baseball bat! i don't want to be reminded that it took me 5 hours 23 minutes 48 seconds to cross that damn finish line (i should have finished with my friend Brooke at 4:24:35). i guess the only thing that makes me feel better is that i wasn't last. out of the 10,643 people who actually finished the race, i was the 7,524th person to finish. there were almost that many people who didn't even finish at all, so, i have to feel some kind of accomplishment in the fact that i sucked it up and hobbled myself to the end.

in the future, if i ever mention the idea of running another marathon, please just slap me!

suck it San Diego!