Josh Ran A 5k

One time I begged Josh to train for and run a 5k.

He agreed.

We found a deal and registered and gave ourselves just 5 weeks to train.

I had just finished Color Me Rad, so I was confident I'd be fine. But Josh has asthma and has never run a day in his life. I figured he'd be OK because he's sortof awesome like that. 5 weeks? Pshaaw, we'd be fine.

Then I rolled my ankle at the triathalon. And it looked like this for two weeks.

One of these ankles is fatter than the other....

Then Josh injured his foot.

So we didn't train for like 2 weeks.

And then we only had a week until d-day.

Oops.

Because of our serious lack of training and the fact that we both wished we were dead before mile 2 of our most recent training run we were both pretty confident that we'd be walking a couple of times during this race.

The weather wasn't supposed to be great, thunder clouds, rain, and overcast all day, but if you ask me that's the only weather worth running in, so I strapped on my new shoes (thank you Mother's Day) and we loaded the kids in the car anyway and headed North. (Did you know Ogden is still really far away?)

They're pink! Probably because I love Aundrea.

When we got there it was cold, but not wet, which we took to be a good sign, but as I started assembling the jogging stroller I started to get nervous. There was definitely something missing. Something important. 

The handlebar. 

When I take apart the jogging stroller to hang it from the ceiling of our garage, I stick the handlebar in the back. Saturday morning is when I learned that Josh doesn't. He puts it on top of the shelf right next to the hook. 

Obviously since I put the stroller in the car, we didn't have the handlebar. 

I made Josh push the stroller the whole way with no handle. Because I'm super-mean and he's super nice like that. 

We got to the beginning with plenty of time, so we drove the course. It was a lollipop course, and where the lollipop meets the stick there happened to be a big grassy area. Josh immediately figured out that we could just run to the park, sit down and wait for people to start coming back. We'd just join them on the way back and pretend we are superfast runners. Smart man.

Our goal was to run clear through the lollipop and back to the park. Then if we needed to we could walk for a bit before we ran again. 

At the park we high fived each other and kept jogging. 

I told him I was listening to a 30 minute mix (thank you RockMyRun) and I thought we could probably run for 30 minutes. So we were going to go to the end of my mix.

At the end of my mix we high fived each other and kept jogging. 

At that point we could see the finish line, so we decided we'd just power through and run the whole thing. 

Roughly 3 minutes after deciding we'd run the whole thing, the wind picked up and the rain started pounding down. Josh was still pushing the gimpy stroller and their screen was open. So I closed the window (which has been rolled up for roughly 18 months....) while we pressed on. I'd bat it down like a cat with a ball of yarn, and it would roll right back up like a cartoon window shade. I'd bat it down, it would roll up. 

Meanwhile John Boy started crying and Tommy really really wanted to share the almonds with him to make him happy. So there I was batting the window down like an idiot while my babies are crying and I'm shouting "No Tommy! He doesn't have any teeth!!! No teeth Tommy!" and running sideways. I hope that's where the photographer was hiding....

Right at the end the course went from a very open road to a very narrow sidewalk, since we were finishing in the 37 minute range, there were people around us walking and pushing strollers. We were coming up behind them on the sidewalk, but Josh took the opportunity to go "4 wheelin!" and we pounded around them so we wouldn't have to stop running so close to the finish. 

We finished in 37 something (no official times...) and both felt great at the end of the run. We were ridiculously proud of ourselves.

Our friends (3 other couples in the ward) also hit their goals and overall we did awesome on this run!

To top it all off we were big winners in the raffle. 

Seriously. I won toilet paper. I'm sortof awesome at winning race raffles ($50 at Masherz from my Tri this year!) and it was a small race, so I was confident I would win something. As soon as the kid held up the TP and everybody laughed I knew it was mine. All mine. And I was right. *sigh*

Josh won a pair of ladie's running socks, and I knew he would use my TP, so I figured I was justified in taking his winnings, but when a lady won the men's socks she immediately came over to trade him. Lousygoodfornothingmen'srunningsocks. So I really came home with nothin' but a 6-packa TP. 

Also a sortof firm commitment from Josh that if I find a supercheap race sometime in the near future he will possibly think about participating again because this was so dang much fun. 

I'm calling it a wildly successful race.