I DID IT! I DID IT! I DID IT!

Actually I should say we did it! My dh and I signed up to walk the Indianapolis 500 Festival Mini Marathon this year. It is a 13.1 mile trek through Indianapolis, including an opportunity to walk/run around the oval at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that needs to be completed in 4 hours. We are both a little too big to be runners, at this point, so we signed up to walk it. We have been training since January, but because of weather it was hard to get very big walks in and we were always pushing a stroller during our training. Today was the big day! My mom came over at 5:30 a.m. (THANKS MOM!) to watch DD and we headed downtown. I was nervous and very excited! Nervous because I didn't want to get half way through and have someone come up and say I was taking too long and had to take the bus to the finish. Nervous because although we've been training, I really didn't know how fast we could do it and we never actually tried to walk 13.1 miles (10 miles was the most). They limit the field to 35,000 participants and we were in the last corral, so probably in the last 1,000 to cross the start. My adrenaline and excitement really got going once we crossed the starting point. There is live entertainment through the whole course, which was mostly good. And there were a lot of people on the sidelines cheering us on, which was very cool! My "mini" goal for the mini was to make it to the speedway. I've been there a couple of times, but never actually walked around the track and that was where the half way point was. As it turns out, that was the hardest part of the walk for me. It was pretty warm at that point and not much of a breeze and the track is huge! So I didn't think we would ever get done! I forgot to mention that the weather was perfect today! All week it looked like it was going to rain, but this morning was clear and about 60 and then the sun came out and it warmed up, but it wasn't too warm. The next few miles were a lot harder, but at that point I knew we would make it (I wasn't about to give up!) When we hit the 12 mile mark I was so excited, but when we were about to walk across the finish line, I got goosebumps! I was really making it and I wasn't the last one! It was a very proud moment. Afterwards we got a cool medal (see below). So, I am a little sore and I do have a blister on the bottom of my foot, but I don't care! I did it! We completed it in 3 hours 46 minutes and our average pace was 17miles per minute. I cannot complain about that. I don't know what place we were in, just around 30,000 people completed the race and if I had to guess we were in the bottom 1,000 (just like we started), which is fine by me! This is the medal they gave us, way better than I expected! Sorry this isn't stamping or scrapbooking related, but I just had to share! I do have some creations to post, but some will have to wait until after Mother's Day next week! Thanks for reading about my exciting day, hope everyone is having a great weekend!