I'm still standing

but my feet are blistered and I don't ever want to run another marathon. 

This photo was taken moments after finishing.  I was so happy not to be moving.  The race was HARD.  Much harder for me than my first marathon.  I won't bore you with all of my thoughts on what made it harder I'll just say it was hard.  I finished in 4 hours and 17 minutes.  Guess what?  I finished my first marathon in 4 hours and 17 minutes.  Weird.

Running this marathon was the brainchild of my mom.  This is my her 60th year and to celebrate she wanted to run one more marathon.  We (all of those pictured above, plus one more) wanted to join in the celebrating and run with her so we signed up!  Except injury hit and our plus one had to back out.  Then, a huge injury hit my mom.  So severe that she has been walking with a brace for over a month and will have surgery next week.  We were all broken hearted when she told us there was no way she could run.  It seemed cruel that the person who really wanted to run in the first place was sidelined.  As is typical of my mom, she didn't spend any time feeling sorry for herself  Instead she became our number one cheerleader for the remainder of our training.  Then when race weekend arrived she made us a carb loading dinner, gave us a pep talk when none of use was too peppy and dropped us off right at the race start.

And then, along with these amazing people she followed us around Memphis, yelling and cheering and helping us to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  

None of us had a stellar race, but it was still a very, very good day!  We had a great meal at Rendezvous, and then had a wonderful evening of laying around watching movies together.  

The girls were with my dad and Kyra all weekend so of course they were as happy as could be, which only added to Kevin and I having a really great weekend...we could relax! 

So glad to have this accomplishment behind me!