Snow, Soreness, and Revisions, Oh My!

Sorry for the blog silence the last little while. I had one agent give me suggestions for a major-ish rewrite of the manuscript I'm shopping around, then I had another agent ask for the full manuscript. (WOOT!!) But I wanted to give her the best version so I pretty much ignored everything that wasn't essential (like housework, dinner, brushing my hair, the phone, etc.) to do the revisions the first agent suggested so I could send the revised book to the second agent. And do it in a short enough time so the second agent didn't think I was blowing her off or something. I sent the final, new & improved, version off this morning. *whew* The revisions made it a much better book. The first agent was spot on and I am soooo grateful she took the time to give me the suggestions.


And in the middle of all that I ran my first half-marathon race (that's 13.1 miles for all you non-runner types). In the snow. And cold. Did I mention it was snowing?

I'd like to think that I looked all composed and athletic when I was done, like this pic.

But it was realistically more like this:

And I want to apologize to the people in the parking garage who didn't want to watch me wiggle out of my soaking wet clothes and change into dry ones (thanks to Jenn for the great advice!) but it really helped.

I'm happy with my performance. I pushed myself and finished in 1 hour 47 minutes, which is a pretty steady pace of about 8 minutes per mile. Yea! The guy who won the whole thing finished in 1 hour 9 minutes. That's just unbelievably fast! I'll take my time, though.

A couple of fun things to share about the race. It snowed the whole time. Oh, wait. I already mentioned that. *But* there were still people running in shorts and tank tops. I was all layered up with gloves and fuzzy wrap covering my ears.

There was also a pretty big crowd, so we were crammed together in the lane of the road that was cordoned off. I was sort of close to the starting line and could see some race official stand on a truck and yell for a minute. I have no idea what he said, because none of us could hear him. Then a gun went off. Many people (me included) weren't expecting it so a lot of ladies screamed. I didn't, but I sure jumped. I thought that was kind of funny.

Another interesting thing was that there was a division of the half-marathon that was a relay race, so I couldn't let all the runners blowing past me after mile 6.5 phase me, because some of them were in the relay and so had just started.

One important thing I learned is that it's not easy to drink Gatorade from a little Dixie cup while running. Is very messy.

Even though I was pretty sore yesterday, overall it was a fun experience and I'll probably run another one. I've had a lot of people ask me if I'm going for a marathon next, and the answer is "No." Sorry. I have no desire. Two hours of straight running is plenty. Much longer than that and I think I'd just get bored. I will do some more Sprint Triathlons, though. But not in the snow.