The Woodlands Marathon Relay

Joe has a coworker that started running about a year and a half ago with her husband in order to improve their health and she has been a great encouragement to both of us.  Michelle ran her first full marathon this past January at the Chevron Houston Marathon and her husband was unable to finish due to some stomach issues.  He needed to slay the beast that is a marathon finish so he targeted The Woodlands Marathon on March 2, this past Saturday.  The Woodlands Marathon offers a relay option so we decided to do the relay along with Michelle and another teacher Joe works with, Phil Masters.  Phil is a young and spry 24 year old who played soccer at Wheaton College so we gave him the anchor leg! 


The race was a lot of fun.  We finished with a time of 4:13 and were pleased with our result.  Our next race is the Austin 10/20, an event we are really looking forward to.  Joe has a very ambitious goal of one hour and forty-five minutes, so it is time to step up the training and see if we can get there by the April 14 race date!  Here are some pictures from our relay at The Woodlands Marathon:

Best running partner ever!

Our team name was GONE SQUATCHIN - all you Finding Bigfoot fans will appreciate that.  What could be a better team name for an awesome foursome running a relay in The Woodlands???

Joe and Phil!

Finisher medals were really cool, and the footprint looks just like a squatch print!

It was an awesome relay!

Austin Half Marathon

As we told you in our last post, we are doing our best to become runners.  February 17th we ran and finished the Austin Half Marathon.  It was an awesome event, a tough challenge (mentally), and an overall fun experience!  It was the second half marathon for each of us, but the first we ran together.  Here are some pictures of our fun:

We did our pre-race carb loading at one of our favorite Austin landmarks, Home Slice Pizza!

This was taken just before the start, it was freezing outside! 

This was somewhere around mile 6 or 7, on our favorite stretch of the race - running down South 1st back towards downtown.

Mile 8 and feeling great!

A dear friend caught up to us just after the 10 mile marker and we were able to run with her for a little under a mile before the full marathon runners took a different turn.  It was Christie's first full marathon and she did awesome!  She was a huge encouragement to us while we were together here!

Mile 12 is pretty much all uphill.  This is one portion (picture doesn't do it justice) where we passed a couple hundred people over a couple hundred yards.  They had ran out of gas and were walking.  It was a mental challenge to not do the same!

A welcome sight!  12 miles down and the top of the hill!  Enfield has been owned!!!

We did it!!!

Our favorite finisher medals, the crown jewels of our growing collections!

We highly recommend the Austin Half Marathon to anyone out there looking to run a challenging half.  They also had the coolest finisher medal we have ever seen, being the proud Texans we are!  Yes, Lindsay has been fully converted!!!  The spectators were awesome, the event was a big challenge, and the total experience was amazing!