Nancy's Blog

South Jordan Half Marathon.  I couldn't get the race format to work for the time so I had to publish this like a normal run.  This ended up being a very interesting race.  It was quite cool when we got to the race start.  We could have arrived at least 30 minutes later and still made it in time.  I thought since we were getting dropped off that the roads might be crowded, but there wasn't any traffic on the way up.  Leslie could have slept in for another 30 minutes.(Off course I always wake up at 4 or 4:30.)  We huddled around the warmers for awhile and then got in line for the POP.  There were lots of them so it was quick.  We waited until the very last minute to take our warm clothes off and head to the start.  I saw Kris from our running group and his wife and Leslie saw her bosses wife.  We started off nice and easy.  Since I wasn't able to train much for the past 5 weeks I wanted to be sure I made it to the end.  We ran past a lady that looked like she could be in my age group so I talked to her for a minute and she was in my age group.  We kept plugging along and at about mile 5 Leslie needed a POP stop so I told her to run ahead.  I met her just after mile 6 and there was no POP there.  I tried to get her to run ahead because I was getting very tired.  When we got to mile 8 I was slowing down and the other lady in my age group caught up with us.  She told Leslie she would stay with me so she could go on ahead.  This lady was very nice and she used a technique where she would walk for about 10 steps about every half mile.  This really helped me to not get so tired.  My foot was hurting just a little.  We kept doing this until we got to about the half a mile when a marathon runner passed us and was running very wobbly.  He then started walking wobbly and then collapsed.  We ran up to him and a biker stopped and gave us his water bottle and we helped the guy drink some.  We told him to stay laying down.  After a couple of minutes he said he wanted to finish the race.  We helped him up and he was still quite wobbly so Carol took one side and I took the other and with his arms over out shoulders we helped him wobble to the finish line.  It was his first marathon and he finished in 3 hours and 13 minutes.  Carol and I walked across the same time but they gave me first place and her second in our age group because we were the only ones in our age group.  It probably added 10 extra minutes to our time but we were glad we could help him finish.  My time ended up being 2 hours and 36 minutes.  I could have finished 10 minutes faster if we hadn't helped the runner that collapsed, but I'm glad we helped him.  We still got 1st and 2nd and a free entry into next years half which really made me happy.