I won!

Yesterday I participated in what was billed as a 5K but what turned out to be a "4-mile challenge" at my husband's law school, and I was the first female finisher! Now, there were only about 50 people running and only about 7 of them were girls, so it's no big feat. But I won a $30 gift card to a local sporting goods store and since I've never won anything before (That I can recall), I'll take it! Heading into the fourth mile, I knew I was the first girl and looking behind me saw no one, so I slowed down quite a bit. My splits went something like this:

Mile 1 - 8:08
Mile 2 - 8:27
Mile 3: 8:39
Mile 4: 8:57
2.2 - 8:46
Average - 8:33

So my splits were hideous and I started way too fast, wearing myself out, but luckily it didn't matter. It was also an evening race after a day of work (for which I woke up extra early so that I could leave early to get ready for the race), so perhaps I would have had more energy if it had been in the morning.

This race was quite informal and disorganized - first the whole "oh wait, it's not really a 5K, it's 4 miles" thing, then we all just walked over to this intersection and someone yelled "Go!", then we had three motorcycle cops who were supposed to be blocking major intersections for us but they stayed with the frontrunners so us in the back didn't have their support, then there were allegedly going to be 2 water stations but there were actually zero, and there was no chip timing, just a guy with a stopwatch at the end telling you your time as you finished, and of course no mile markers. After the race, a girl came up to me and said, "Did you win for the girls?" and I said yes and she handed me the gift card. We did get nice technical t-shirts. So it was very casual, laid-back, and small. It worked out though.

This morning I once again had to fight the urge to stay in bed when my alarm clock went off at 5:10 a.m., but I got up and went to the gym to try out Hot Fusion Yoga. I thought this would be more like Bikram Yoga, but it wasn't really. It was tough!

We worked out the whole body, using a body bar and weights for upper body, did lots of lunges, squats, etc, and did ab work. I wore shorts because I thought with "hot yoga" they'd turn up the temperature and it'd get really sweaty, but they didn't and all the other girls were in yoga pants. So I felt self-conscious about that the whole time. There were two guys there, and all together there were about 10 of us.

It was a really good workout, and normally it's $5 each time but the instructor told us first-timers we could do this first time for free to see how we liked it. It was really hard and I prefer running, spinning, and doing weights on my own, but we'll see. I'm going to try out normal yoga next week and probably Pilates as well. I do want to do one of those regularly along with running, spinning, and weights.