Redemption

The Moab Other Half was yesterday and it went really well for all of us.  Jake finished at 1hr 45min, Spencer finished around 1hr 49min, and I finished at 1hr 51min, so we were all within a couple minutes of each other.  My goal was to post a sub-two hour time so I'm happy with what I did.  I don't know how many more road races I'm going to do though because it beats me down, I much more prefer to run in the mountains.  The Antelope Island 50k in March will be perfect for that, its 0% road, but 50k is 31 miles so strategy and training will be much different.  Until then its going to be play time in the mountains, climbing and hiking until winter sets in and then ski like its my job.  I'm hoping to get in about 70 ski days this year.  Okay, so why did I call this post redemption?  Here's the story:  3 years ago I had signed up to do this race with Jake when I developed a stress fracture in my hip from over-training.  Things were not good all the way around.  I was just getting over the break-up with my fiance, was putting in a lot of stressful hours in surgery, and my drinking was getting worse.  When I was diagnosed with the hip fracture, they had to lay me off at work because I could obviously not stand for long hours at work, so I was at home on the couch or in bed with nothing to do but be depressed (and drink, heavily).  I won't go into all of the gory details, but lets just say that its been a long, hard road back, and yesterday at the finish line I felt like I finally could close this chapter of my life.  So now it is on to bigger and better things.  I have many endurance and mountaineering goals, all of which will be interesting indeed.  This half-marathon is something that was personal.  It was nothing compared to what I have planned.  So strap in and hold on, I'm just a pup in this world and I've only began to explore.