Saturday, October 11, 2008

Breast Cancer Awareness Run/ Walk

With Thanks to Dez, I am back in another contest for weight loss. This one lasts til December 31st. We have to weigh in every other week, it is nice to have a longer time between weigh ins.
It is also nice to have some races to help motivate my exercise.

Today was the Breast Cancer Awareness Run/ Walk at Greene Isle Park in Green Bay.

It is a 2 mile or 5 mile race. I met some girls from work and we decided to all ride together. My employer gave us all T-shirts for Free to use on that day. So we all had ours on.

It was at a pretty area lots of trails and trees. Lots of people had signs on that said who they were walking/ running for. Over 2500 people took part. It kind of makes you realize just how BIG cancer is. It affects so many people.
Some people had "In memory of..." on there shirts, that made me want to push harder.
I saw lots of "In honor of...", but not a lot of signs saying 'SURVIVOR'.
A few, but not many.
I saw 2.

People die from this everyday, I was so lucky to be able to run it especially on such a nice day!!

There were 5 of us doing this walk/run. One of my co-workers, brought her Daughter that is between Brock and Reece's Age. I'll call her M. She was willing to run with me for parts of the race. On the way to the race her Mom announced to us that she just ran a mile in 9 minutes the other day.
Dang, I thought, Ok she is WAY FASTER than me. Ok Rachel... GOALS HERE... Think BIG.
*sigh*
As we began the race I kept thinking happy thoughts and asking her if M was ready to run yet. for about the first 8 minutes or so we hung together as a group, they kept our path narrow so it was going to be pretty hard to run around people, so I was glad she didn't.

After the first mile we decided to start to run. I think M humored me for the first 50 feet or so and hung by me, but before the next mile I just couldn't keep up to her anymore. She was easily weaving in and out of people. At one time I panicked when I couldn't find her, but she had started to walk. I was so glad...er... able to breathe again. She said her knee had 'popped'. I think she felt bad for me.
: )
I was grateful.

We walked to the next aid station, where they had Water and CHOCOLATE, M was very happy about the chocolate. She even pointed out an unopened chocolate that was abandoned on top of a cone that was marking our way. She was telling me about her cross country practices and meets for most of the rest of our walk, it was interesting. I really want Reece or Brock to do that next year, but we will see. No pressure.

As we finished the race, M picked up the pace just a bit, we finished just over an hour.

Unfortunately, her mom wasn't feeling so well when we finished. I began to think how lucky we were when we did the 13.1 mile walk, no one got sick, all did great.

Not today. Her poor mom spent the rest of the time dizzy and nauseous, I ended up driving her big truck home. I hope she is feeling better. We were all just happy to be no longer pelted by BITING ASIAN BEETLES. They were all over! And they were HUNGRY!!

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