On Ragnar

I thought about beefing this post up with pics, but they're all on facebook. So, if you want to see pictures of our Ragnar adventure, you can check them out there.

Now then, the experience was wonderful. Training can be boring, tedious, and challenging. If you're beginners like us, an exciting thing happens partway through training: you hit a personal best every single week. The training schedules are set up to help you gradually increase your distance and time while giving your body adequate time to recover. So you have a long run once per week, usually on Saturday, and some shorter runs during the week for recovery and building up to the next long run. After a certain point in our training, every single week was a new personal best. It was incredibly rewarding and motivating.

A great side benefit to all this training is that I feel great. I'm losing weight (12 pounds since pre-pregnancy weight) and my clothes fit great. Some of my pants are even baggy!

Blake and I both performed better than we expected on race day. I was having some knee and hip pain during my last leg and ended up walking the majority of it. Even then, I pushed myself into a fast walk--not a mere mosey--and finished with a very respectable time. I was so pleased with myself.

Even though we were running a race, it wasn't a super competitive, feel bad if you lose kind of race. The other runners were all so supportive. When I was walking for so long, many many people who passed me said supportive and encouraging things. I think they know that if someone is walking for so long, they've got to be struggling, and offer support. It really was so encouraging to have people rooting and cheering for me. Everyone else is also pushing to accomplish something, to reach a new personal best, and this creates a fun and supportive environment. Who wouldn't want to spend a couple days basking in that positivity? I was the slowest runner on our team but that didn't matter because my performance was my best yet. (My first leg was a personal best in both distance and pace. It was so fulfilling.)

There was another runner on our team, Emily, who is my new idol. She's funny and beautiful and intelligent and so fit. I have a serious school-girl crush on her. Anyway, she's run several Ragnar races before and trains in a CrossFit gym and has incredible stories to tell about all her adventures. I watched her run in awe. She was so fast and is one of those people that makes running look good. After finishing her last leg, she commented that this was a personal best for her: the first Ragnar she'd completed without taking any walk breaks. How cool is that? We're all pushing and achieving new things, even awesome Emily. (I also have school-girl crushes on Lauren and Natalie, but I think I've gushed on and on about Ragnar enough for one day.)

All in all, this was a fabulous experience. I will definitely do another of these races. And, completing this race gave me the extra boost of confidence I needed to sign up for my next challenge. I'm now officially registered to run the TinkerBell Half Marathon in January. I'll be running with team Special Olympics Southern California. I've got a fundraising page if anyone wants to sponsor me and donate to Special Olympics. I haven't personalized it yet, so I'll include a link to that later.

Oh, one more thing, to top off all the wonderfulness of our Ragnar experience, we hear that our little baby-kins was a very good girl with her grandparent babysitters. She seemed to be having a wonderful time with them. We're so glad they came to watch her for us. Knowing she was safe and well cared for allowed us to relax and have a great time.