The Indy Mini Kicked my Butt

 

And I’m super pumped it’s finally over and I can give my injury proper rest.  I’m not going to sugar coat it, it was pretty bad and I’m really hurting today, but I’m glad I did it but I’m overjoyed that it’s over.   But lets start from the beginning shall we, and you can come with me into my decent into misery.

My sister and her friend drove over from Illinois in the afternoon on Friday and from there we combined all our crap into one car and headed over to Indianapolis.  All the time complaining to each other about how “not ready” we were for this and thinking of excuses to get ourselves out of it.  I planned on faking a seizure at the first medic tent and she decided to hole up in the first port-a-potty along the route and wait for the slacker bus to pick her up.

 

This is us in our corral waiting to be herded into slaughter.  We must have been happy we were about to die!

It was a quick night in the hotel.  We didn’t even really get to enjoy the evening since we are old and need to get to bed by 8 to avoid the arthritis setting in.  Oh, well.  We did manage to get up and to the corral by 7:00 to wait another 30 minutes before we could even walk to the starting line.  This is the biggest half marathon in the country and when I say big I mean 35,000 runners.  But not only that there is a 5K that happens before that.   Then there is a wheelchair and corrals A-Z.  We ended up in R, mostly cause we suck, and we had this guy to tow along.

 

Meet Bryan, we tricked him into thinking we know what we are doing.  All part of the evil scheme.

Not to mention the 30 minutes you walk from your corral to the start line before you can even start running.

 

Instead of following through with our well though out plans to avoid the race we decided maybe we should try to run this shindig.  Our only goal to was to avoid the dreaded slacker bus that will pick you up if you get behind pace.  The three of us started out well but as time wore on the heat really picked up.  I don’t do well in heat but I knew this and had been drinking water like a fish all week and even was a good girl and took water or Gatorade at every pit area. (Awesome race support: they increased their aid stations to 11 because of how hot it was planned to be).  What I should have planned for was my bum foot.

At mile 7 you enter the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and do the next 2.5 miles in there.  If you know anything about a race track it’s that the turns are not flat and most of this trace is a really big loop.  This is where my foot died.  It hurt so incredibly bad to run on the track at that odd angle.  Jen and Bryan took off ahead of me just after getting into the Speedway and I hobbled through the next 2.5 miles.  By mile 10 I could have just sat down and waited for the bus my feet hurt so bad.  And I kept going over in my head how different last year was and how much healthier I was. Suck!!!

Thanks a lot, losers!!!

 

It hurt to run but it hurt even more to walk, so I managed to run scamper hobble the next 3 miles to the finish.  And I think I’ve learned my lesson; don’t run injured, it’s not that fun.

Jen and Bryan finished 10 minutes ahead of me and seemed mildly un-phased by the previous 13.1 miles.  My time pretty much sucked and makes me want to cry, but at least it’s over and I can work on getting better.  According to the Garmin it was 2 hours and 44 minutes I think though the chip time will be more due to some unplanned pit stops by someone I will not name… You know who your are.

 

So for now I’m alive and ready to get better. Race review for the morrow.