girl's weekend in st. george

I have the greatest group of friends that I grew up with, and I'm so lucky we are all still friends! This is the group I go to Bear Lake with every summer, and now we've come up with a winter get-away (they go on more trips together than that, but it's too hard for me to go on all of them!), and what's better than St. George in the middle of winter. (With all the inversion we are having here at home lately, I wish I were back down there now!) Oh, and we'll throw a half-marathon in there while we're at it! Someone came up with the idea that having a half-marathon to train for in January would be a good way to get through the holidays--I'm here to tell you, it wasn't that "good" this time.

I've had a bit of a hard time with running lately. I ran this same half last January, and felt good the first 2/3 of the race and then my body just died the last 1/3. Then I ran a marathon in May, and once again felt good the first half (13.1 miles) and then I went past dying and hit rock bottom like I never have before. I have been playing sports for over 30 years and never in my life had I felt like that before where my legs could NOT go any faster, no matter what I tried telling them. (Maybe they have been hanging around my boys too long because they don't seem to hear me either!) So this was going to be a make-or-break race for me. Don't get me wrong, I like running, but I like it on my own terms, and I especially don't like feeling like I have to run when I'd rather sleep in. I didn't train like I felt I should have, but I have been doing more cross-training, so I was hoping that would help.

It was a brisk 30 degrees or so at 9am last Saturday--a perfect day for a race! Jalynn ran the 5k so she took lots of pictures--thanks Jay! She got one at the start of the race, and then here are the rest of us coming in together. We finished in just over 2 hours, but I didn't even care about that because I felt SOOOOOOO much better than my 2 previous races. Plus, I have to put in a plug that they talked me into getting an ipod to run with this year, and Michelle was kind enough to sync all our ipods together with the same songs. It was so nice to have music to listen to in one ear and still be able to talk!! I love my hot pink "shuffle," which will never be confused with Daren's silver "shuffle," and thanks to Daren I got some real sweet earphones too.

This is the girls--Jalynn, me, Megyn, Michelle, and Teresa. And our medals of course. But really, the race is just a good excuse for a girl's weekend away *but don't tell the husbands that!* We did miss Tara coming who had to bail at the last minute because her husband had to have neck surgery, so thanks to Tara for letting us stay at her condo without her!!

We had a blast the rest of the time. This is the best I could do for a shopping picture since I didn't have my camera--Jalynn is in the mall holding all of our bags!! We laughed so much on this trip!! We were laughing so hard while shopping at the distribution center (by the temple), don't ask why we were there, but I can be a bit forgetful sometimes! The lady who ended up helping us was very nice and made the comment, "You girls are either having a great time or you have been drinking! *gasps* Did I just say that in here?" Which made us laugh even harder. There was also plenty of eating, hanging out, eating some more, planning when and what we were going to eat for our next meal, and we got in a movie a day--Bride Wars, Last Chance Harvey, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Ya, my vote is 0 for 3 on movies this year! Not impressed with any of them.

Oh, and since I finally got to run my race, I finally got to drink a Diet Coke again--however, it wasn't as great as I hoped it would be. I've only had a couple since then, but I'm really going to do better about not drinking it everyday like I did before. Anyway, it was a great time, but it's always good to get back home.