Guest Post: The H recaps the OC 10K

My notes in purple :)

Hi, I'm the H. Giraffy asked me to do a recap of the random 10k we "ran" over the weekend. I apologize now for not being nearly as brilliant of a writer as my wife. (He’s a liar, he’s funny.)

We signed up for this race a long time ago because it was super cheap and worked well with Giraffy's run schedule. I've never run a 10k, but I was coming along well in the little running that I had been doing. That is until I hurt both of my lower extremities (feet/ankle/tendons/whatever) running one day in June. Which stopped ALL of my running until this race.

My plan was to hang out at the beach while Giraffy ran and maybe take a picture or two of her finishing the race. Unfortunately for me, my legs weren't bugging me when we got there and it was pretty chilly so I decided to run along with her. Giraffy was a little worried that I would just hurt myself more. (it's true; I even tried to give away his chip. No one wanted it. Should have been clue #1....) I was worried that I would be frozen when she returned. (Note: it was 65* and overcast. We are wusses in SoCal)

So she is gracious enough to run with me and the only thing I didn't want to do was slow her down. She may not be faster than me in short bursts, but I have always been the hare to her tortoise when it comes to distance.

7am comes around and the race begins...

And I am kicking butt! My own for starting this race. What was I thinking?! I hadn't run in forever. I had just started to feel better. I'm going to ruin any type of healing I've done because it's cold out! Thankfully Giraffy has her race plan (she always has a plan), and I stick next to her to make sure I'm not dying after three minutes of running.

And just FYI, I felt no real lasting pain.

Mile 1 comes and goes and we're doing pretty well. Mile two is coming up and Giraffy is just starting to get warmed up. But then something else starts to look good too... The sidelines! It's not cold anymore. I've gotten some running in… Already two miles more than I planned on going. I could just sit down at the comfy looking benches until Giraffy comes back around. Perfect! That's what I'll do.

Until I realize we just passed them while I was daydreaming of daydreaming.

Meanwhile, while I'm still heartbroken about missed race skipping opportunities, Giraffy says she's just not feeling it this race. I think the lack of Disney characters and cool blogger buddies has affected her motivation for this race. She's stuck with the H who (she thinks), at any moment, is going to get bored of running at her pace and sprint off ahead of her.

Back to the actual racing. For all our issues with running the race, we actually realize we are going at a nice pace. And now we're halfway done! Woo Hoo! I'm reenergized by this and tell Giraffy that I want to do a faster second half of the race. She laughs at me, but agrees to try anyway. We're doing great till mile four. It quickly became Giraffy is doing great. I'm running on empty. The walk breaks for me are getting longer while Giraffy's appear to be getting astronomically shorter. By mile five she's like "see you later slow poke, I can't be seen with you anymore; you're embarrassing me." (lies, I tried to see if he wanted my handheld, but he turned it down, because, I quote, "I don't think I can lift my arms to hold it". Heh. But I would have stuck around...) I do my best to play catch up, but it's a losing battle. She is now destroying the course, and me in the process! I was so happy just to see the finish line.

Giraffy looks like she's ready to run another 10k, just not here because all we got were a silly little hey you ran today ribbon and a tree in a box. I took one for each of us because it may be fun to watch a tree grow from a box.

But even with all my sucking and the losing to Giraffy it was still a lot of fun to run with her. For the five miles she slowed down for me ;)