I'm a Half-Marathoner! Part 1

It's official: I'm a half-marathoner!  13.1 miles done!  I can't even believe it; it feels so surreal.  It has been an amazing day of family and friends and celebration and I don't even know where to begin to recap!  Be warned: this will be a long, possibly emotional, picture-overloaded post.  Let the journey of race weekend begin...

My family came into town yesterday afternoon and that's when it hit me that this was the real deal.  We've been planning for weeks for them to come up for the race and now here it was.  Ah!  We headed off to Pomodoro for some serious carb-loading.

fam <3

cousin Liz, half of my inspiration for this race :)

we love carbs!

After dinner we drove around some of the course where I had mapped out directions for the fam to follow and meet me at certain points.  Because I'm super awesome at directions, we ended up nowhere near any of the places I had thought I mapped out.  Looks like they were going to have to be creative for race day!

I got home and finished up my race day playlist and laid out all of my gear for the morning:

best playlist EVER: i timed all the songs perfectly
and crossed the finish line to "all i do is win"
now THAT'S a win.

best race shirt ever. definitely a hit with the spectators

gear: check!

I woke up this morning to my very first alarm which I think by now you all know is extremely rare never happens.  All I was imagining was hitting snooze and then my alarm not going off again and me sleeping through the race.  No bueno.  I was suuuper nervous and excited when I woke up and ready to go!

race day here i come!

I got to Blue Cross Arena wicked early which meant 1. more time to freak out and 2. having my running buddies to take pics with:

me and em - twins!

me steph and katie - HFM training girls!

so many people!

By the time we headed outside to the start line I was running on excitement (get it? ha. ha.)  The cool thing about starting in the back of the pack?  Seeing the masses of people participating in the race:

2,300 people!

About 3 minutes before the gun went off I saw these crazy fools cheering their pretty little faces off:

see the blue shirts? best cheerleaders ever!

Because I have the best family ever, they HAD T-SHIRTS MADE that they all wore!  Naturally I almost cried when I saw them (tear-jerker #1 out of 275 on the day).

race pic + my blog...so awesome!

blog tagline and the inspiration behind it! <3

And just like that the gun went off and so did we!

bring it on 13.1!

Because I want to savor the memories and give this day all the detail it deserves (and make sure no one falls asleep during my stories), I'm going to make this a multi-part post.  See ya tomorrow for the rest of the recap!