Riverbank: The final race

This past weekend was the Riverbank Run and the conclusion of races for my fundraiser!  I was debating earlier in the week if I was actually going to run it because I was pretty sore from the marathon and my poor toe looked awful!  I thought I broke it it hurt so badly but my brother in law told me that runners get something called curb toe and its just a repeated banging on the shoe so it gets bruised.  Not gonna lie, was trying to kinda use it as an excuse to not run it (haha) but I figured since it wasn't broken I should.  :)

Ouch!

I'm glad I did.  I told my sister and her friends, Kim and Rebecca that I would run with them for moral support.  This was Rebecca's first time running such a distance (or at all really) and her friend Kim decided to run the race 2 weeks ago!  She had been running on her own, but there wasn't a goal in mind.  Kim ran the Riverbank 5K with me a few years ago when I was pregnant with Tristan and she told me that she couldn't understand why people liked running, and look at her now!  haha.  I guess I did the same thing, saying I thought it was ridiculous to even run a 10K!

Happy finisher!

Gaetan took a picture of our finish :)

The weather was pretty nice.  It was a bit muggy and it sprinkled a bit, but nothing horrible.  It was warm too so at least being a little wet wasn't to bad.  I ran into a lot of people I knew during the race!  My childhood best friends Mom was running so we chatted it up a bit.  :)  Some high school classmates were running too, and my old violin teacher was a pacesetter!  I ran into a lot of people I knew at aid stations too.. which is kinda funny.

Kim and I stayed with Holly and Rebecca for the first few miles but then we kinda took off on them.  Rebecca is into this run-walk philosophy, so when we hit aid stations we would lose them.  I'm glad that Kim wanted to go a little faster (which still wasn't very fast at all) because the impact was starting to hurt my feet again.  I saw a friend from capo named Patrick... really energetic guy!  SUPER nice.  He was enthusiastically cheering for Striders.  I saw a high school friend's little sister handing out water for the pregnancy crisis center, a college friend at an medical aid station who is now a PT (Kim wore knew socks and was getting mad blisters so we got some band aids), a friend from high school that I'm in symphonette with now, and some people just cheering on from high school as well!  Kim joked that I knew everybody there...

I was really glad that I could cheer and encourage Kim on to finish.  She was getting pretty tired towards the end (who can blame her?!) but she finished strong!  So it was an easy breezy race for me, lots of fun to hang out with Kim!

Mile 13!  Having fun!

Holly and Rebecca around mile 12

A nice little collage my brother in law did.

Dad ran the 10K with some of the fellowship men (Luke, Abe, Rob, Sam and William) and our friends Scott and Leigh did the 10K as well.  After the races we went out to eat, and hung out at Mom and Dad's for the traditional pizza and beer later that night.  I know the kids loved hanging out with Grandma and Don :)

All my race bibs and medals :)

Our fundraiser isn't quite completed.  We are at 67% which is awesome!  That's over $2,100!  I am going to keep the campaign open until it's completed, which is hopefully soon.  :)  Spread the word!  The solution for clean water is SO attainable.

JVG