“…it was just nice to have people at the finish line.”

The biggest thing I did is that yesterday, I ran an entire 50k, and it’s only the second 50k I’ve done. And it was the same course as last year, but some things were a lot different. Like last year I drove myself down because I was concerned about COVID, but this year since I have three vaccines under my belt, I took my friends up on the offer to ride down with one of them, and it was really enjoyable especially because the weather ended up not being very good. It was nice to have someone else to deal with it. It was in Northern Indiana. And last year, the course itself, like the ground itself, was cold and frozen solid, but this year it had been snowing and raining a really cold rain for the early morning and until part of the race started. So there was a lot of mud and a lot of muck on the course, and a couple of times I would put my foot down and I would think that, like, my shoe was going to come off because the mud would just, like, swallow up my shoes. And it was, yeah, pretty gross and not fun looking. But a couple miles later sometimes I’d run through like a clear puddle and I would kind of wash my shoes off, but my shoes and my socks were just soaked, and I was by myself for a lot of it. It was two loops of a course, and I was afraid that they weren’t even going to let me start the second loop since the first loop took me so long, but they let me start my second loop surprisingly, and they said I had to be done within nine hours and my time was 8 hours and 50 minutes. So I just barely made the cut off. And my friends waited and celebrated with me, which was really sweet of them because one of the ladies in our group was just so fast. She could have, like, went home and showered and been cozy in bed by the time I finished, but it was just nice to have people at the finish line.