Turkey Trottin’

I’m sorry to keep you waiting, friends. It’s been a while since my last post. My family and I have been traveling for Thanksgiving and with all of the travel and family hub-bub, there’s been little time to devote to my online journaling. In any event, I’m back for a minute or two while Boo slumbers in his pack n’ play.

It’s been an interesting week on several fronts. First and foremost, my husband and I ran our first Turkey Trot together. It was fun. But not really. It was actually about a 40+ minute drive to the race, and since we have remained on Eastern time, we had plenty of time to drink coffee and have breakfast before the race. Unfortunately that did not work to my benefit as I had planned, and I had to pee before we even arrived at the site. Upon arrival, we realized this was no small race. I’m not sure on the actual numbers competing, but there had to have been thousands of people there. One blog I have come across noted over 3,000 10k runners. Yowza.

Well thankfully my husband and I decided to run the 2 mile fun run. Which had quite a few people. I’m so mad that neither one of us had a camera to document the adventure. I digress. Back to the story.

After a quick 10-minute detour (okay, fine, we got a little lost), we arrived at the Red Mountain Park where the race was being held. We had arrived about 45 minutes early. That left us just enough time to park the car, walk to the registration table, pin on our bibs, grab our t-shirts, hustle back to the car, and then get into place at the starting line. Since I already was about to pee in my pants, I scoped out the nearest port-a-potties. There were three near the starting line. And since there were thousands and thousands of people, the lines for the stink holes were almost a mile long.

I decided, “f’ it.” I could hold it.

Hubs and I are hanging at the start line, listening to loud music, scoping everyone out. Chillaxin’. We’re ready. We’ve been preparing for our first race together for a couple of days.

On your mark! Get set! Go!

And away the giant crowd of runners shuffled. It was a slow start, but we finally got a chance to break away from the pack. There were kids, grandmas, grandfathers, teenagers. You name it. What a fun crew. As we’re chugging along, I’ve discovered that I really have to pee. I think we got to the one mile marker and I thought I was going to pee in my pants. Then my husband decided that he was getting too winded with such a small stride, so he started taking longer strides. I didn’t want to hold him up so I stayed the course at my pace, and then sprinted to catch up with him when I felt a good kick of adrenaline. It was fun running together. Except the pee part.

We rounded a corner from road to park path, and we knew we were getting to the finish. That’s when I kicked it into high gear. I was not going to let pee bring me down! So I hauled ass to the finish.

There was one point that I felt like I might not make it and I kind of started to slow down and almost stopped. But I figured I would rather pee in my pants than not make it. What was two miles, really? I pushed on, got to the finish line and promptly continued to run/walk to the nearest port-a-potties. Much to my disappointment, there were at least 20 of them, and each had a line of 75+ people. 

We decided to book it out of there before traffic took over, and we stopped at a gas station where I could finally relieve myself. It was almost unbearable.

So that’s our first Turkey Trot in a nutshell. It was definitely an experience I will not soon forget. Next time I’ll make sure that we arrive much, much earlier, and I will not drink coffee beforehand! Lesson learned, no doubt.

Now that the race is over, I’ve taken a couple days off from running. I decided to run today and much to my dismay, I could barely chug out a weak 0.93 miles. So lame. I blame a few things. Number one, I’m not a road runner, I’m a treadmill girl. I psyche myself out when I run on the road. I don’t know why, it just kind of happens. Number two, I was running by myself. I had zero accountability. At least if I run outdoors with someone, I have someone else to hold me accountable for pushing on. And at least when I run on my treadmill, I have to actually physically will myself to stop before I can just stop. And number three, it’s been a while since I’ve run any amount over 2 miles. It might take a minute to get back into the groove. I can’t wait.