Running on my birthday

Today is my birthday!!! Today was also the Riverwalk 5 Miler I've been looking foward to. Yesterday was Andy's last day of school EVER! Needless to say, he was zonked, so I gave him a get out of jail free card (read: I let him sleep in). My mom, also pooped, volunteered to do her "motherly duty" and came with me (lured mostly by the promise of free stuff). Note to self: if you ever want to score free stuff, take someone without shame, aka Mom.

Mom would have had even more fun had it not been freezing (my coldest birthday ever!) and had she had some company in the form of Andy's muscles to drag around all that free stuff. We had a blast, though. It was probably my worst race ever, as well. We went to dinner at the Olive Garden last night and I didn't exactly fuel up properly. I was so tired, so cold, so unmotivated. This is such a HUGE race (I placed 6th in my age group last year), I knew I wasn't going to win anything. I just wanted to hang out and enjoy the music and goodies. To make matters worse, my chip kept coming loose as I ran, costing me precious seconds every time I had to stop to tighten it. Eventually the stupid thing fell off as I approached the finish line, and I didn't even bother with my finshing kick. My time didn't get recorded. I even went back to look for the darn thing. I found the plastic tie (never again!), but no chip. Alas, I'm sure I'll get a bill for 30 bucks.

The race was fun, and it was awesome having my mom there. We scored lots of goodies. I was probably a good 30 seconds slower than last year, and my photo finish time says 44:49. Blah. As I passed the first mile marker and it said 9:00, I knew it wasn't going to be a good race!

My birthday was good...didn't turn out exactly as planned (fondue). But Andy & I did have a very nice post-run outdoor lunch at a Japanese/Thai place on a lake and gorged on ice cream and cake instead of dinner. What more could a girl ask for? :)