“Run Today, Brag Forever.”

Today’s post title is inspired by a little boy sitting on his mom’s shoulders during the Shamrock. He was holding a hand painted sign, “RUN TODAY. BRAG FOREVER.” I fell in love with him and I may have asked him to marry me.

I hope you’re ready for a baller race recap, cause I’ve got an overshare of pictures comin’ your way.

Let’s cut to the chase first – the BIG NEWS.

I cut some serious time off my half marathon PR. I finished in 1:42:56.

16th place (top 2.5%) in my age group. 537th place out of 6869 runners.

Yuengling has never tasted so good.

And my toes still really, really hurt… but it was so worth it.

I’ll set the scene on Saturday night: lots of water (thank you, Camelbak). Oodles of pasta. Stuffed animals and a pre-race slumber party. Yaaaaay, we are running twins and we are 6 years old!

Fast forward to 5:15 a.m. Sunday morning. Anastasia and I are up, we’re stressing over going to the bathroom (honestly), we’re eating a breakfast of light carbs, and we’re visualizing this:

Garmin Forerunner at the ready, iPods and Gu in hand, and potty stop complete, we’re running to the starting line, late as usual, and slide into corral 3 (oops.. we were supposed to be in Corral 1, but we never seem to make it in time for our accurate starting place).

Haaha.. that’s the pace calculator stats from my Garmin. Can you tell where our water breaks were? And that I sprinted the last mile at a 6:30 pace before forgetting to turn the Garmin off as I dizzily wandered to the bananas just past the finish line?

This is how we felt post-race.

If it weren’t for this girl, I would have never even tried to run a half marathon. Ever. Now, thanks to her, I’ve completed three!

And the Yuengling Shamrock Half Marathon post-race party goes down in history as the best I’ve attended. By far.

And, although we all planned to meet up for the after-party, we even saw John during the race!

Lisa-Marie and Seth even cheered us on when we passed the beach house on the oceanfront. It’s such a great feeling to see your friends cheering you on from the sideline.

Rob gets big props as the best supporter/photographer we’ve got. I’m pretty psyched for our plans to run another half in May. Half marathon #4, here we come!

It goes without saying we had a blast at the after-party. There was a little Yuengling, a lot of dancing, and a little stretching.

And THEN… our results were announced.

We ran the entire race together except for the last mile. We shaved a collective 27 minutes from our previous personal records. HIGH FIVES AND HUGS ALL AROUND!

Because, let’s be honest… what’s the point in running 13.1 miles and not pigging out on tuna wraps, fries, nachos, and froyo afterwards?

Dear Shamrock Half Marathon 2011: Consider yourself dominated.

Love, the A Team.

Tagged as: Half Marathon PR, Shamrock Half Marathon 2011