The Army 10 Miler

 This morning Brendan and I ran the Army 10 Miler!!!  Although I've been training for the marathon in January and I've run a few runs longer than 10 miles, this was my first real race!!  You'd think with all of the training that I've done and all of the swim meets that I've competed in (admittedly ages ago), I wouldn't have been nervous but boy did I have butterflies!!  My parents were here for the weekend and watched the kids for us which was awesome!!
The race started early - 8 am for the first wave and then 8 minutes for each subsequent wave.  This meant that I actually didn't cross the starting line until almost 9:00 and Brendan was well over halfway finished by the time I even started!  That being said, we got there WAY too early.  We drove and parked at the Pentagon mall parking lot and we should have just stayed in the car for an hour becuase it was FREEZING outside in the dark!!  We walked around for a while, randomly met up with some people that we knew, used the bathroom 1,000 times just to pass the time and get out of the wind until we HAD to check our warm clothes and go to our corrals.  It would have been much more fun to be running with someone - at least then I would have had someone to stand with in the corral, even if we didn't stay together for the race.
Once the race started things went well from the beginning - I guess except that I've been doing this run-walk-run training method and it calls for walk breaks from the beginning and no one else walked during the first 2 miles - so I ran too and once the slower runners started dropping out, I added my walk breaks in.  It totally worked just like it is supposed to - I spent the entire race passing people.  The course was really fun although there weren't very many people cheering along the way - I guess no one wants to get up early on Sunday in DC to cheer on a bunch of runners.
I felt great the entire race - I stuck to my plan to hydrate at every station, run at marathon training pace and to use my gels just as if I was running longer than 10 miles.  I even negative split the race - which was my biggest goal - and came in 7 seconds under my goal time at 1:44.53.  My 5 mile split was 52.26 and my 10 K split was 1:06.01.  It's not super fast but if I run the marathon at that same pace, I'll finish around 4:30 which would be amazing.  I'm really just going for under 5 hours but it would always be nice to be faster!
I can't wait to run it again next year.  It was fun to catch up with friends from all over who had come in to run and met up with us after the race.  Maybe next year it will be my tune up run to the Marine Corps Marathon!!

My first race bib ever!!

In the corral - waiting in the cold!!

 There's the starting line!!

 After the race!

 The finish line - walking back to the car!