During the late winter/early spring my friend Ashley and I decided that we were going to sign up to run a half marathon. Neither one of us had ever ran one before so we were so excited to dedicate ourselves to running one. In fact, I had never ran further than 6 miles before so I about messed my pants when I pushed the purchase button on the website. For those of you who know me well know that I am a true sprinter and struggle going slow and struggle even more going for a long run but I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. 
Ashley and I started our training off really well but the closer it got to the race the harder it became to train. Both of our schedules were crazy. I was still teaching and coaching track and it was really hard to find times where we both could get together to run. I decided to see if I could beg others to run with us so we could have other training buddies. I called my sister in law Lynette and convinced her and her son Jesse to sign up and run with us. The race was on June 11th which was a week after school got out.
The night before the race I couldn't sleep because I was so nervous. We had to wake up at 3:00 am because we had to be there by 4:00 even though the race didn't start until 6:00 am. When we got to the start of the race it was so cold. They built little fires all around for us to try and get warm. As the race got closer to starting I told our group to go to the very front because I didn't want to run further than I had to. When the race started we took off at a faster pace then we normally run. Ashley and I both looked at our pace on our watch and saw that it was a lot faster but we both said that we felt awesome and thought that we would be fine (we later realized that was a stupid decision). When we got to the 6 mile mark we were at 43 mins which is a little slower then a 7 min mile pace. We slowed it down some but not enough. We were both doing awesome until about the 9 mile mark, which is where my family was watching. After I passed them I realized that there was no way I could finish the race at the pace I was going and that I better slow down or I won't make it but Ashley kept going. When I got to the 10 mile mark I thought that I was going to die. I remember thinking that there was no way I was going to be able to run another mile. I don't know how my legs kept going. When I had about 2 miles left I saw Ashley ahead of me and it looked like she was in the same boat as I was. When I got to her I thought about running the rest of the way with her but I thought if I slow down any more I will stop and I made it my goal to not walk so I passed her and kept going. I finally finished with a time of 1 hour and 58 min. My goal was to run under 2 hours and to run faster than Jason did when he ran his last year ( 2 hr and 20 min). I remember the last two miles the thing that really kept me going was telling myself not to let Jason's time beat me.
As I was at the finish line I kept looking for Ashley thinking that she should have been right behind me. A couple mins go by then I noticed that two race workers were practically carrying Ashley because she was so out of it. I felt so guilty for not running the last part with her. We took her to the medical tent where they tried helping her with little success. The whole time we were in there she was saying the funniest things becuase she was so delirious. We finally decided to take her to the emergency room where she had 3 IV bags put in her, that is how drained she was. Luckily everything turned out okay and we can now look back and laugh at all the crazy things she was saying
