Was someone named Murphy running with me...

...because, whatever could have gone wrong today did on the 10k race I ran! We packed up the car and headed to Baton Rouge so we could spend some time with the family and I could get a race in for my training. The race started at 9am so I figured I could get there by 8:15 to find parking, register and get mentally prepared.

I woke up, took a look at the clock on my mom's microwave which said 6am. I thought "I've got plenty of time" and went back to sleep. Woke up at 6:40 am, took a shower, and then jumped in the car to get LM some milk at the quickie-mart. As I am heading home, I happen to look at the clock in the car which says 8:10!!! My mom's clock was an hour slow and now I am officially late, so I dump the milk off and fly towards downtown BR. Of course, I don't know the area so I couldn't find parking. Finally, the parking gods lead me to the overflow parking for the casino the race started at. I registered and finally settled in to start.

I then turn on my new Garmin, only to find the battery almost dead! (I can only blame myself. I had ample time to charge it last night, but figured it wasn't needed). Luckily, I have a stopwatch on my Ipod and I set that. So, the Garmin dies 18 seconds into the race and then I notice that my headphones are only working in one ear. So the whole race, I had music in only one ear. What a mess!

The good news, though, is that I came in with my best time ever, by far! 1:04:41! I had expected to come in at about 1:08 so I was stunned when I hit mile 1 in under 10 minutes. As I was running, I was beating my time every mile. Thank God for the Ipod stopwatch. I can not run without a timer.

So, all in all, I am really proud of myself and it motivates me to continue my training for the Half Marathon end of April.