What?! Its Over!!!

I cannot believe that its over! What am I gonna do with myself? Train for another one! I loved it, I am definitely running more 1/2 marathons next year. I was a little confused when we stepped off the bus and saw the crowd, wondering why in the hell did we start with such a big race! Its the second largest race in Nevada! If I haven't told you yet, there was 50,000 people running! 1,500 Team Challenge runners!!! Crazy!!! I asked Kristi why we didn't start with a small one and move forward.....Go big or go home!!! After the race started, I couldn't imagine running any other one. The atmosphere was amazing! The strip was crowded with people cheering for you! Bands every mile to keep you going, watching people get married! And a extremely large preying mantis with fire coming out of its antennas!!! It was crazy!!!
Our weekend in Vegas will be a weekend I'm sure either of us will forget. We met some pretty awesome people there from our team Minnesota. The Inspirational pasta party was well.......inspirational! I really cant imagine running without running for a cause. I hope I am able to get on Team Challenge again. Maybe next time Ill be running in Hawaii! All the teams from Team Challenge had such great energy, it was so amazing being in the same room with them. Hearing how much people had raised for this cause was also incredible. One person alone raised $70,000!!! Can you believe that?! I want to do that!!
Sunday morning when we woke up was pretty somber. We really didn't have much to say to each other except...."I'm nervous." I'm getting nervous now." I'm really nervous" We then met our team at 200 in the lobby and got our team picture and then walked to the buses that took us to the beginning of the race. I have never seen so much orange in my life!!! Or so many port-a-potties! There was pink ones too! Kristi and I were in corral 28 with two other of our teammates. We had to walk about a mile or two from there to get to the starting line. We lined up at 430 and when we reached the starting line it was 510! They were letting waves of people go every 45-50 seconds! I am very proud to say that we beat the time we had in our heads and that we didn't walk!!! Mile 10 was the worst, but when we rounded the corner there was the strip again! And we made the strip our bitch!!! We finished at 2hrs 33min then had to walk a mile to our Team Challenge tent to let them know we were alive. Then we had to go pick up our bag of personals in UPS truck, ONE UPS truck had 1,000 bags in it in NO particular order! So when we were there to pick it up you had to give them your bib number and then they would dig thru 1,000 bags to find that number! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!! We watched the Ballagio fountains 3 times!!!! So once we finally got our bags we had to walk another mile or 2 to our hotel room! Once we made it there and showered we went to a pizzeria and got our supper!! How enjoyable was that!!!! Pizza had never tasted so good!!

Thanks again to EVERYONE that helped us get there! I hope we did not disappoint!