What do Foreigner, Lady Gaga, and the Black Eyed Peas all have in common?

No clue?  I'll give you a hint... it involves 10 stinkin' miles.

Last weekend I ran the Hermes Cleveland 10 Miler.  That's right.  This girl ran 10 miles!!!!

I felt like a rock star through about the first 5 miles, and I had the split to prove it... I ran the first five miles in under an hour (58 minutes to be exact) ::cue the sound bite of Charlie Sheen's 'winning!'::  I had a pretty good group to run with on the way out, and from an article I read last week about the "imaginary tether," I imagined myself tied to an individual about 15-20 yards ahead of me.  The concept worked perfectly on the way out, but on the way back, there was no keeping up with the group and lost a lot of ground.  Second split was 1:11.  Oye.

At around mile 6 I thought I was going to die.  The race route completely sucked.  Literally out Lake Ave. and back.  I was into the gorgeous houses for about 2 miles.  After that, not so much.  I wanted to walk.  Trot, trot, trot.  God, if only I could just stop and walk a bit.  Trot, trot, trot, trot.  My feet kept moving.  Something I pride myself on is not stopping.  I don't walk.  I refuse to walk.  I think it comes from the first 5K I ran where I encountered a hill and I saw people starting to walk.  I felt superior to them.  Sure, I was still barely at a run, but I kept going.  I didn't stop.

At any rate, the sole purpose of the run was to put myself in a semi-similar scenario (whew- say that five times fast) to the 1/2 I'm running next month.  I wanted to know I could do at least the 10.  Things I learned from this race to do for the next race...

• Body Glide (or similar body slicking/non-chaffing goo) will be necessary. 
• As much as I'd like to think that I've slimmed down in several areas, the war wounds of running seemed to honed in on my hip bones, lower back, under-boobage, and under cheeks.
• Hydrate more
• After that 5th mile I really did hit a wall.  I had the Jelly Belly Sport Beans with me, but have read that I was going to need to consume more fluids if this was the nutritional route I was going to go. 
• Don't rely on "the race" to provide me with post-race nutrition
• Seriously, a girl can't get a banana after running 10 miles.  Yeesh.  They were out, and my post-race drink tasted nasty.  And I left the chocolate milk at home...
• Dress for "warm weather"
• Even if you're cold at the beginning of the race, you'll be fine about a mile in.  I think, too, overheating was something that was a major contributing factor to hitting the wall late in the run.

And here's a few pics that the hubs took....

Gotta get tagged up...

Me and my beans...

Still excited for some reason...

Looking a bit dead...

And what I look like after 10 miles, over dressed, dehydrated, and chaffing... sexy!

Turns out I did finish just 1,580 out of (what Jason heard) 2,300 participants-  this makes me look good!  From the results page it looks like 43 people finished after me- which makes me look totally awful.  Who knows?  Maybe some of the slackers couldn't finish it.  Lazy bums!  Whatevs... I finished. I suppose that's all that matters!