run, forrest, run

heart, have no pity on this house of bone:

shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.

no man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;

to give, to sell at auction, to destroy.

Back in, I don't know--November maybe?--I remember sitting in front of the computer, thinking about how much I dislike running and yet am burdened with the perverse desire to become a runner. I thought about my body and how it's getting older, fatter, and harder to move. Thoughts of how terrible I look in "performance" fabric entered my self-conscious head.

Then I thought to myself: whatever. My body may not look great, and I may sweat a lot and turn bright red and jiggle, but who cares? At least I'm moving around. I know skinny people who couldn't run a mile let alone three. So I bit the bullet and signed myself up for my first 5k as motivation to start running regularly. Then I was reading on a blog somewhere about this mom who runs the races that Disney holds. It looked so fun, but it was prohibitively expensive. A regular 5k costs around $40 bucks or so to register, but the Disney races are easily three times as much. Crazy! But...it looked so fun. So I told my mom. My mom loves Disney more than anyone I know. She also hates running as much as I do but also wants to be a runner. So it was pretty much settled. She paid for my registration as my birthday present and we were the "Sweaty Yetis" getting ready to run an obstacle race, through the Animal Kingdom, at 11:00 at night. 

Yeah you read that right. Nearly midnight. Running with 4,000 other people. Hurdling hay bales, running through tires and crawling in dirt under a cargo net (at least I did that last part, my mom refused to do it cause it was "dirty," hahaha). It was pretty great. Until we got to the finish line and realized we still had a scavenger hunt to finish before we were officially done. Now, when I initially read "scavenger hunt" I think of searching for objects and clues. But this hunt turned out to be running from one place to another to pick up cards with obscure clues about points on a compass. It was hard. We started off running, all excited from our race, but that soon petered out and we ended up strolling with the rest of the crowds. The stations weren't clearly marked and at one point we had to backtrack all the way back out of the park. It was frustrating. Then the final clue was so hard that there were literally hundreds of people sitting on the ground with papers trying to figure out what the heck we were supposed to be doing. It was actually kind of funny, I overheard so many people grumbling about how late it was and we just ran an obstacle race and couldn't we just be done already? I had to agree. 

But at last we were done and we ran/limped tiredly to the finish line and got our awesome finisher medals. They have a compass inside, how cool is that?

The only thing that was not great were the pictures taken by the photographers. Oh. My. Goodness. Worst things ever! Picture if you will:  flash photography, at night, taken from the perspective of someone sitting on the ground looking up at runners. Sweaty overexposed double chins galore. Ick. I mean even super skinny people looked terrible! I know I decided not to care about not looking athletic and all, but there's a line, people.

Since we were there alone, and had no way of carrying cameras, we didn't get any good photos ourselves, but a Disney worker was nice enough to at least get this grainy yucky iPhone picture of us at the post-race party. 

The highlight of the whole race for me (besides the obstacles) was getting my mom to ride the Everest roller coaster with me at the party. Hahaha oh my gosh. It was funniest thing ever. She kept up a steady stream of comments that started off with "okay, okay, that wasn't so bad" "I'm gonna like this, this is fine" and progressed to "I hate this" "I hate you" "this is HORRIBLE!" "who likes this?!" and "please please tell me this is the end this isn't a fake ending right the ride is really over now right?" and lastly, "I think I'm gonna cry." I ended the ride bent double, crying from laughter, and my only regret from the whole night is that I didn't bring money to buy the picture they always take when you're the most freaked out. In the picture I was laughing and my mom's hair was sticking straight up and her eyes were scrunched shut and she looks like she's being tortured. Ah *wipes away a tear* I am a bad daughter. 

So. Two of the four 5k's I wanted to run this year: done. This upcoming weekend I'm going to be getting muddy with another friend of mine. Kinda nervous about that one. Me and monkey bars are not friends. But slowly, sloooooowly, I think running and I might be getting on better terms.