Update! The results are in. I finished in 2:09:52. Jess finished in 2:09:53. I win! I finished in 1421st place, Jess in 1423rd place out of 2051 finishers. (I thought there were over 4000 runners. (?)) I was 798th out of 973 men. Jess was 625th out of 1078 women. They haven’t posted our positions within our age groups.

Today was the day we’ve been training for. This morning we completed the Spirit of Pittsburgh Half Marathon.

Was it fun? Yeah. It was nice running through these neighborhoods. Was it hard? Not too bad. Our training prepared us well. Are we tired? Yeah, after having a huge lunch at IHOP, we napped for an hour or so mid-afternoon. We got up, walked the dogs, and then started thinking about dinner. If nothing else, the run made us hungry. We got some food from PF Chang’s for dinner. I’d never had PF Chang’s before. PF Chang’s is terrible. The food was dry, cold, flavorless, bland, and just plain drab. It was very reminiscent of frozen entrees from the grocery store. Jamie – you were right; that place sucks.

Wait, how did this get to be about PF Chang’s and not about running? I’m tired, cut me some slack, Jack. Hey, that’s my name. Anyway, will we run another half marathon, or even hunker down and do a full marathon? Probably not. The run, itself, wasn’t bad, but that’s only because our training prepared us well. But the training is something I don’t want to do again. I’m not too happy about how much life we had to give up over the past 10 weeks to get here. I only went mountain biking once since we began training. Jess went zero times. We had to get up at 4:30 every day to run or exercise before work. This meant we had to be in bed by 9:30 at the latest. The training just took too much away from the rest of our lives, otherwise I’d definitely consider doing another half or even a full marathon.

In the end, I’m very glad we did it. It’s an accomplishment we’re proud of. 18 months ago when we started running just to de-pork ourselves, we could only run for 1 minute before we had to take a walking break. Today we ran for two hours and ten minutes.

It’s bedtime. I’ll post our actual times once the event organizer gets them online. They said they’d be online this afternoon. We’re still waiting.

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