I Did It!

My jacket!

The end of the race - finish line in sight!

Super cool plaque:)

I finished all of the races in the Triple Trail Challenge!  Got my jacket!  It's a nice jacket too I might add.  A black Marmott that's actually fitted for a girl instead of being all big and bulky.  Now I'm anxiously awaiting cold weather so that I can actually wear it:)

So the last race of the series was on Saturday.  It was the Mid-Mountain Marathon.  There's an awesome single track trail that goes all through Park City, and the race was on that.  You start at Deer Valley and finish at the Canyons.  The race actually went really well.  I started out nice and easy, which I think helped me in the long run.  The whole race has lots of ups and downs in elevation, but miles 15-20 were pretty brutal as they were pretty much all uphill.  That's a hard part of a marathon to have be uphill because you're pretty tired at that point.  I was tired, but I didn't let myself walk.  I knew that if I walked it would be hard to get going again.  So I just put it in low gear and kept trotting along.  I only walked up one pretty steep hill that was right at mile 20.  Who puts a steep hill at mile 20 anyway?

The last five miles were actually pretty fun.  Usually this is the part of the marathon where you think you might die, but for some reason I was loving life.  These miles were all downhill, but last time I did this race I was so tired at this point that I didn't go very fast.  This time I cruised down the trail.  It was awesome!  I was passing people all over the place.  I had a negative split, which means that I ran the second half of the marathon faster than the first half.  Let me tell you, that's the way to run a race.  Its way more fun to pass people at the end than to be passed for sure.  It ended up being a pretty hot day, so I spent a fair amount of time at all the aid stations.  In true Spjute fashion, I overheat quickly.  So at every aid station I drank like 3-4 cups of water and then dumped one over my head.  I'm sure everyone thought I was crazy, but you do what you gotta do, right?

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that I fell.  That's right, tripped and slammed the left side of my body into the mountain.  Super cool.  Don't worry though, people were falling all over the place.  When you trail run there's tons of rocks and stuff to step over.  When you get tired it gets a lot harder to pick up your feet and you end up taking a dive.  I saw like four people fall and one lady told me she herself had fallen four times.  So my whole left side is bruised and my right leg feels like it was sprained or something.  Good times.

The results of this race?  I cut 10 minutes off my time from two years ago and finished in 4:25.  Nothing super fast, but I'm happy with it.  I got seventh in my age group for the marathon.  But here's the big news.  I somehow placed second overall for the girls who did the Triple Trail Challenge!  That's right, they announced my name and everything.  I have a plaque sitting on the table in the entry way.  I might leave it there forever.  Feel free to come by and see it:)  No, actually, none of my times were crazy fast.  Apparently though there aren't a whole lot of girls who sign up for the whole race series, so the competition wasn't too tough.  However, I passed two of the girls who were in the running to place in the last two miles.  Suckers!:)

Okay, I'll stop telling you all (the two of you who read this blog) how fast I ran.  It was a good race series and I'm proud of myself for doing it.  Before this year I wasn't one for trails.  Going uphill for long amounts of time was hard for me.  I worked hard though, and now I have my jacket:)  Will I do it again?  Probably, but not for a while.  Too many races that made it so we couldn't do a lot of camping or anything else as a family.

Anyway, I'm off to try on my jacket again....