Porter's first 10k!

Last Sunday we did the Pints to Pasta 10k in downtown Portland that starts at the Adidas building and ends up at Old Spaghetti Factory. It was me, Jeff, Porter via Jeff, Nicole Wagner and Erin Hill. It was pretty dang fun. Part of the run was along the river too - can we say beautiful? It started at 8am, so we had to get there early, park at OSF, then get bused to Adidas. There were a ton of people in line for the buses so our bus actually got to the starting line after 8am, but we all had timing chips on our shoes so it didn't start timing us until we crossed the starting line.

Here we are in line for the bus - we had to wake Porter up 2 1/2 hours before he normally gets up so he was still in sleep mode.

When Jeff and I signed up to do this we hadn't really thought about what we were going to do with Porter during the run. Our ward meets at 9am so I didn't want to ask anyone in the ward to watch him. We had to leave the house at 6:30am so I didn't want to bug anyone that early to come over and wait until Porter got up. So we originally planned on putting him in the jogger stroller and taking him with us...that is until I found out that strollers were not allowed. So our only other option was to put him in a baby backpack dealio and hike the course, and Jeff was awesome enough to volunteer to carry him. We tried running a little with Ports in the backpack but he didn't dig that too much. I wasn't about to leave Jeff high and dry and go off running on my own, so we opted to just walk the 6.2 miles as fast as we could walk it. The last little bit of the race we took him out of the pack and carried him so that we could run over the finish line. We finished it in just under one and a half hours, which is pretty good for walking. Porter was a trooper through all of this - we had deprived him of sleep and then carried him in a pack for an hour and a half, but he was in good spirits and was entertained by all that was going on. It also worked out good that we didn't run because I've still been having trouble with my knee and Jeff's also been having trouble with his knees. So we've actually switched to biking - a lot better on the joints. I do run once a week still though just for kicks, but not too hard or for too long.

After the race they had scrumptious Jamba Juice shakes and Old Spaghetti Factory provided yummy food. For signing up for the race we also got t-shirts, another free meal in the future at OSF, free Jamba Juice cards and some other freeby food cards. Not too shabby, eh?

Both Erin and Nicole ran it in under an hour. I do plan on doing more races in the future, but I need to give my knee a break for awhile. But we will be looking into bike races next. Having a goal to shoot for keeps me more motivated.