I don’t know about you.

B-b-b-b-birthday weekend, kids. A perfect excuse for me to force the entire family to get in the car and drive 3 hours south so I can run a half marathon in 4degree snowy weather and not even feel guilty about it     /’;[popoikk,,//////////////////////////////////////////,…,………………….,,,,,,,                           ………………..

Ok, now that the period key on my keyboard works properly, let’s try this again.

SO, it was my birthday on Saturday. And it was cold and snowy here in Edmonton, but according to my weather app, it was lovely and sunny and warm down in Calgary, which is where we were headed.

Armed with coffee and some choice dance music downloads, we dance partied our way south.

As is usual, it took us longer than expected to do anything or go anywhere, so we didn’t arrive at our hotel until the mid-afternoon. The original plan was to get there, pick up my race packet, go explore around a bit, and then go out to this pizza restaurant we’d seen on some TV show about pizza places. But by the time we arrived and got into our room, we sort of all just flumphed down on the bed and watched tv (though the girls had a really hard time with the concept of not being able to control what show was on and “what do you MEAN I can’t watch more Toopy and Binoo, just PUT ON ANOTHER ONE” and bah, kids these days, they don’t know how good they have it with their dvr and their Netflix, in MY DAY you watched just your Reading Rainbow and your Mr. Rogers whenever it came on and you liked it.) and then all took turns taking showers/baths.

Beverly Hills Hillbilly-ing our way up to the 24th floor.

Flumphhhh.

By dinnertime, the idea of getting everyone dressed in real clothes and wrangling all these children through dinner at a legit restaurant was just beyond daunting, so- we ordered a pizza and bought a deck of cards and decided to just chill. Happy lame birthday to me. Except, it really wasn’t lame. It was fun, because I spent it eating pizza (though it was the most godawful pizza I think I’ve ever had, like seriously, it made roller rink pizza look like gourmet. Forget that, it made school lunch pizza look appetizing. It was really gross.) and playing Go Fish with my favorite people in the world.

To be perfectly clear, contrary to what these pictures may lead you to believe, I was NOT letting these kids drink unlimited Coke. That was my soda, and yes, Bianca may have had a couple sips. In the picture with Fiona, the can was actually empty, and Fiona decided that the can could play a hand of Go Fish with us. So, you know. Quit judging me.

Nate had managed to procure an ice cream bar from the hotel gift shop as a birthday dessert, and I stuck it into the mini-fridge to enjoy after the kiddos went to bed. But then that whole process ended up taking over 2 hours, (again, THEY WEREN’T DRINKING THE COKE) and by the time everyone was finally out, I sort of just fell asleep too. At like 10:30. Not gonna lie, it was kind of amazing.

I woke up the next day feeling great. My race was scheduled to start at 10am, and our hotel was only a 5minute walk away from the start line. And since I woke up at 6:30, I had loads of time. Fiona and I hit up the free breakfast and brought a bunch of food up to the room for everybody. I tried to make coffee in the room, but since I forgot to bring up any milk or creamers, I had to resort to the CoffeeMate “coffee whitener” which was just as disgusting as it sounds. So I dumped that and headed down the block for what turned out to be a truly excellent Cinnamon Dolce latte.

Then I had a look at the info paper from my race packet and saw that they offered an early start for anybody that thought they would take more than 2.5hrs to complete the race. Since 2:30 was my goal time, I decided to go for the early start. There were maybe a couple dozen of us that started early? It was cold and windy and snowy and actually quite beautiful. 5k in, I felt great. Snapped a selfie and texted it to Nate. The route crossed the river, turned, and headed into the wind. 10k in, still doing pretty well, but I’d stopped for a small walk break. The plan was to take walk breaks every 5k, but by the time I hit 13k, I needed another break. By 15k I had to break again, and also my phone shut down because it was too cold. From there to the end I had to stop every kilometer, eat a sport bean, and walk for a few minutes. It was a rough final 3 miles. My legs hurt. I was tired. People were passing me left and right, and I’d started a half hour earlier than all of them.

But I made it to the finish, and considering the way I half-assed my training (for example, I didn’t run even once between last month’s 10-miler and yesterday), it went as well as I could have hoped. A finish time of 2:35:15 got me 326th place out of 340, sooo you know. I got a medal. (And hey, I beat my time of my last half marathon by a full 25 minutes, so there’s that.)

If this is 32, I say bring it.

 

Go click that link. I’ll wait.