we did it!!!!

Occasionally I blogged about my running training and how I'd been preparing for my first 5K...Well...I finally did it! I finished my "Couch to 5K" program. That was an accomplishment on its own! I know that there are lots of people who are "natural runners" and can spit out 3-5 miles easily (I'm married to one of those people), but I've never been that person and this was a very long, hard, yet rewarding experience for me.
To top it all off, the week after I finished my training program, my running partner (and best bud), Teresa and I completed a 5K at Animal Kingdom. I am so proud of us! The race was amazing! There were people around every corner cheering us on and running through such an amazing Disney park at night was surreal. It did start raining as we were finishing and we were soaked to the bone, but that didn't damper our mood.
The experience was awesome and I'm beginning to see why people enjoy this "running thing". In fact, we've already signed up for our next race in mid-October. Here are a few pics from our big day. Some of them were taken from my phone so the quality isn't the greatest.

Here's a shot of a FRACTION of the runners. I'm not sure how many thousands of us there were, but we were separated into 12 "waves". We were wave 5 so what you see in this pic is waves 1-4. It was a little overwhelming to see how many people there were!

Here we are right before we started running.

Teresa and I had matching running outfits, but next time we're really gonna have to step it up! Some teams (as you can see below) really got into it! The wigs didn't slow them down, though...they smoked us!

After waiting for what seemed like forever, it was finally time for our "wave" to approach the starting line...

As we were finishing, it started to rain. No, not rain, POUR! At this point we really didn't care. We ended up finishing the 5K at 34 minutes and 43 seconds. That definitely wasn't the fastest time, but if you'd told me six months ago that I would be able to complete a 5K, I would have laughed at you. We were so proud of each other...Thank you SO much, Teresa. I would never have done this without you!

Next time we've got to remember to wear waterproof mascara...just in case!