RANCH!

Last Saturday I ran in my first official race! My family decided to do the marathon relay in the Ogden marathon. My dad, my two sisters and my brother-in-law have all done half marathons before, but they needed one more person to fill out their 5 person relay team and I was willing to do the last leg since it was only 3.1 miles over the 5k course. It was the perfect day for running, beautiful and sunny, and I really enjoyed my race for a number of reasons:

I got to sleep in, while the other relayers had to catch buses that left at either 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. I showed up around 10:30 a.m.

All of the people who had actually run a marathon were REALLY tired by the time they hit mile 23 (where I started), so I had a great time passing people like crazy with my nice, fresh legs.

I got to run a lot of the race along the Ogden River Parkway, which was beautiful (and also sloped a little bit downhill).

I met my goal of finishing in less than 30 minutes! My official time was 28:52, which is pretty good for me.

Preston was delayed on his business trip and had to spend an extra unexpected night in Indianapolis, but he rushed right down to the finish as soon as he landed, and was waiting dutifully at the end to take my picture as I crossed the finish line...but somehow I ran by without him seeing me. Dangit. Oh well. And then somehow we didn't get a picture of our relay team or anything. The only picture we took that whole day was this:

After the race we all went out to lunch at Chili's. Cora was sitting by me, and we ordered her some pizza, which she was eating just fine UNTIL she noticed that I had a cup of ranch dressing on my plate. This girl LOVES ranch dressing. You can see that she looks like she is dipping her fries in the ranch dressing (yuck), but really she is just dipping the same fry into the ranch dressing and then sucking the ranch dressing off of the fry and then re-dipping it (yuckier). At least she isn't using her finger (which has been done), or just drinking it out of the cup like water (which has also been done...yuckiest!). She gets a little excited when she sees the ranch dressing, which I only assume is how it got on her nose and in her hair. She smelled like a carrot stick for the rest of the day.

Here is a picture I stole off of the official photographer's page, just so I have photographic evidence that I once ran a race if I never do one again:

Happy Birthday today to my 3-year-old Daxton! I will do a birthday-boy post for him soon.