A new day

A new chapter of my life is occurring. I'm trying to make some better choices for myself and my family. I made a decision to run a 5K and paid my registration the end of December. I continued to run and prepare myself for the run that was on February 12. I tried to recruit some friends to run with, but it just didn't come together.

Since the race was downtown Nashville, we invited my sister and brother-in-law to come for the weekend as they've been wanting to hang out and see it all. They came in Friday night and we got prepared for the day ahead. The race was at 10am so that gave us time to get up and go find parking before getting the race packet.

Here I am before the race. My sister had made the headband for me. It was a brisk 30 something degrees when we first got there, but as the morning went on, it was in the 40s. I had several layers on and was glad for them in the shady areas. In the sunny parts, I was uncomfortable. The first mile marker, a man was calling out the time, and I got disheartened because it was already over 12 minutes. But, then I realized that he was doing gun time and I was a good bit behind that.

So, the last bit of the race was uphill -- right when you think you're never going to make it! But, you could see the clock. I could see that it said 35 minutes and I thought that I had a chance to improve my time. I picked up the pace and sure enough made it across at just over 36 minutes. But, when we looked at the times posted, I did way better than that. My chip time was 34 minutes 40 seconds!!! That's almost 2 minutes better from my last time.

So, here's the beginning of a new day. I'm going to make a change for the better.