Faithful Muffie followers will note that it's been quite some time since our last post. This doesn't mean it's been a long time since we raced, though! In fact, we've been quite busy globe-trotting in 2013. In January, we met up in Las Vegas to do the Urban Challenge. This was a scavenger hunt race whose course (and therefore length) was determined by how efficiently we could string together the destination clues. We must have done a pretty good job (with a little help from our fan club when we had about three destinations to go) because...we won! We weren't expecting any hardware for our effort, so the gold medals were a fun bonus for about 4 miles of running.
In late April we did our first half of the year, trekking to Nashville, TN for the Rock n Roll Country Music 1/2 Marathon. This was one of my more ambitious travel adventures; the kids and I took a red-eye from LAX to DTW on Wednesday night, we stayed for 36 hours in Ann Arbor, took a late night flight from DTW to BNA on Friday night (we picked up my dad along the way!), got up at 5 AM to shuttle to the start line, raced, and then flew home with the kiddos the next night. Seester got to Nashville via road trip, and somehow I convinced her to fly back to LA with me rather than drive back to MI. Not sure how we would have fared without the extra set of hands!
Not a lot to report as far as our race performance goes...I forgot to keep track of splits, and we weren't really paying attention to the race clocks. I'm going to blame it on the rain. And when I say rain, I mean torrential downpour. For the ENTIRE race. Most of our fellow runners (at least the ones hoofing it with us in the latter half of the pack) were running in ponchos or garbage bags. We were absolutely drenched before we even crossed the starting line, and the rain never slowed down. For the first (but almost certainly not the last) time in Muffie history, we didn't PR during the race. But we did finish in under 3 hours, and we continued the tradition of having my official time be faster than Seester's even though she always crosses the finish line before me. (Finish line photos verify this bizarre phenomenon.)
Both of us felt surprisingly good after the race, and when we got back to LA together we spent some time planning the rest of our race year. We'd originally been planning a race in Missouri for this weekend, but we couldn't figure out workable flights to meet there in time for the race (darn work and school!) We did figure out that the Portland Rock n Roll race (the same weekend) was doable, and when we confirmed that doing the race would earn us an "encore" medal (because that's really what this is all about...collecting medals!!) the deal was sealed. Less than a month after Nashville, we packed the suitcases and the kids (and Justin this time, too) and headed north.
The forecast called for rain in Portland, but the skies relented and we enjoyed perfect low 60s running weather. We had a much more humane 6:45 wake up for an 8 am start, with the start line just a few blocks from our hotel. We took our traditional start line photo decked out in our matching purple shirts (in honor of the Lukemia and Lymphoma Society - we love you Mary Kay!!) and were on our way.
We snuck in with a starting corral full of 2:15 runners, which got us off to a speedy start. And in the end, we finished 12 minutes faster than our previous best.
Mile 2: 11:04
Mile 3: 10:37
Mile 4: 13:24
Mile 5: 10:52
Mile 6: 11:17
Mile 7: 12:45
Mile 8: 13:38
Mile 9: 11:13
Mile 10: 12:05
Mile 11: 12:27
Mile 12: 11:20
Mile 13: 11:08
We're contemplating a Cleveland race in October...you'll hear about it (at some point!!) right here!
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