WooHoo!!!!!

I did it!!  Yesterday I was sore, today i am in pain. lol.  It was harder than I though it would be, and it was easier than I thought it would be.  I will try to explain that.  So there I was at 6AM, me and 22,000 of my closest friends.  lol.  The race was supposed to start at 6:30, but didn't untill about 6:40 due to a fire along the route.  I did hear a rumor that they rerouted us because of it.  I am not really sure.  Anyway, we, back in the "I think I can run a marathon in 6 and a half hours" section, heard the cannon and cheered, and then waited for our turn.  It took us about eight minutes to get to the start line.  That means I actually have two times, the time from the start of the marathon to the finish and the time I passed the starting line to my marathon finish.  Some of us were joking that they should have given us a head start and made the "elite" runners start eight miles back.  Anyway it was a bit of an issue when I passed the one mile mark and saw my time, not the 12 minutes I actually ran it in, but the 20 minutes from the cannon shot to the one mile mark.  But by about the 3rd or 4th mile, I had made up some time and was at an average of a 13 minute mile.  Not bad for a novice, I think.  The hardest mile was where they had shut down a lane of a highway.  There was no shade and the aspalt was so hot and the breeze seemed to have disappeared, and it was of course, up hill. lol  I seemed to change the group I traveled with a couple of times.  I would see the same people as I passed them, and they passed me, then all of a sudden, I noticed they were gone and there was a different group of people.  Most of us ran/walked our way.  Some were just walking, you know the fast walking thing.  They finished ahead of me. lol.   There were a lot of interesting people.  There were a group of firefighters, I ran with them for a while.  One of them was wearing full gear in honor of a coleague.  A woman with three children, fighting a fire who fell through the floor of a burning building and was killed.  There were people dressed as pigs (the race is called the Flying Pig).  There were people dressed up handing out water, I got a pick of some of them, will post when I can.  There were lots of peeps handing out water and gater aide.  Bless them.  There were people handing out candy along the , so many at one point someone running near me said, "Its like the grocery store on sample day!"  Sometimes I took their stuff sometimes not.  I still have some.  There were lots of people cheering you on.  A lot of kids, people with babies, all cheering, "You can do it, you're looking great!, etc.....  That was really nice.  I could have done without the smart asses who always seemed to be at the top of every hill saying "That's the last hill, all downhill from there".  I finally thought to myself if one more person says that I  am going to throw something at them, and if I had had the energy, I would have.  lol.    Near the end of the race, I had given up my run 5 minutes/walk one minute pace for walk, run a minute, walk, etc.....  The head of the NF team came out and ran with me for a while.  That really helped. His daughter has NF and has had several surgeries on her spine.  His advice to me was that when I finished this, I would look at all the challanges in my life differently.  I think he was right.   Then when we could see the Finish Swine (Flying Pig) with 3 minutes till the 6 hour from the cannon mark, he asked me if I thought I could make it to the line under 3 minutes, I said I thought I could, so he got back out of the running section and I made it in one.  I could still life my arms over my head at that point, so I did.  Anyway, I still feel really good about it.  Even in pain.  So I am calling it Excellent!  Now, I just have to get the energy to get out of bed.  lol.