Indy Mini Marathon Bibs

The half marathon was a success! It wasn’t easy though. After writing about my motivation, I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t be able to complete it. Sure, I trained hard and felt like I was in good shape, but Caroline and I both had the good fortune of catching a nasty cold before the race. She had a runny nose for two weeks leading up to the race, and I got a terrible sinus infection and sore throat two days before the race. I was concerned about running while sick and stocked up on OTC medicine and got plenty of rest and fluids in an attempt to quickly fix the situation.

On the morning of the race, the temperature dropped from nearly 80 to around 40 degrees. I still had an awful sore throat, but after my neti pot/salt water/chloraseptic routine, and probably some help from the man upstairs, I wasn’t miserably sick throughout the race. Poor Care still had a runny nose the whole time, but she pushed through. It was FREEZING. Since we were in the middle of the pack, we spent half an hour jumping up and down trying to stay warm before the start. I was so grateful to start moving.

After the first two miles, I settled in and got used to the cold. Before I knew it, we were at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and 6.5 miles were complete. Right around this point, I started feeling a lot of pain in my lower back. When I look back I think that maybe I was really tense from the freezing cold at the beginning and never released that tension, but I’m not sure. I spent the last half of the race with awful pain in my back. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t sore, just my back was really hurting. There was no way I was going to quit, or even walk. After the disappointment of my last race I had to do everything I could to finish.

The last mile was the longest. I kept seeing the mile markers come by and wondering when it would end! They tricked us by throwing in the 3/4, 1/2 and 1/4 mile signs at the end. Caroline and I crossed at exactly the same time – which I thought was pretty funny – 2:20:05. This was 10 minutes faster than we had planned which I am very happy with. We weren’t doing this race for time, our goal was to finish and in that regard it was a very successful race. With a lot of encouragement from Care, I pushed through the pain and finished without stopping to walk or slowing down.

I’m surprised at how easy my recovery was. Besides nearly falling down from tight calves after getting out of bed the next morning, I wasn’t near as sore as I imagined. I did skip any post-race running that week due to being sick, but muscle-wise, wasn’t sore or in pain following the race. I am very proud of both of us for this accomplishment and look forward to starting our full marathon training in June.

This post is two weeks late due to the sickness described above. We’ll be back on our regular posting schedule now!