Not too hot to trot

It's been hot here.  As in, over 95 for weeks.  We haven't mowed our grass in a month.  The only thing we did was even up the stragglers and mow down the weeds.  The yard is more brown and crispy than I have ever seen it.  The pasture is not much better-it will take some major re-seeding in the fall.  The horses are so hot they are actually coming in voluntarily when I fill the water tank to get hosed off.

But all this heat has not stopped us from getting up at ridiculous hours on our days off to race!  Saturday Cheri and I headed out to the first annual Duck Waddle 5K in Ozark.  I made the mistake of not eating enough breakfast and didn't have a great race (not bad, but not great).  But, it being a smallish event I still managed to win my age group.  Instead of a medal I got a watermelon and a gift card to Rib Crib.  Which was ok, except that you can only use the gift card for weekday lunch specials.  Seriously, if you are giving away food, you can't give it away any day of the week?  Granted, another medal will just sit and collect dust on a shelf, but still.

Then yesterday we went to Branson to run our very first 10k.  My original goal (way back before we even committed to the whole half-marathon thing) was to do it in under an hour.  But with some of my recent 5k times I was hoping do a little better than that and run 9 minute miles which would put me at about 55-56 minutes.  I surprised even myself by finishing in 53:30, which figures out to 8:30 per mile.  This netted me 3rd place in my age group. So clearly, I need to set a new 10K goal of under 50 minutes.  All these medals (or watermelons) are making me feel like I might be getting pretty good at this whole running again so I have been picking our road races for the rest of summer and fall with as much (maybe more) excitement as I have been picking out agility trials.

After the 10k we rewarded ourselves by spending the rest of the day at the lake.  Because it really is pretty hot.