Running Through the Rain and the Pain

At 6am today members of our Hulk family and full marathon team met up and headed out to Suwon,

to participate in the 13th Gyeonggi Marathon.  

It was a first for 2 of us but Rocket really helped kick my butt with preparing for it. 

 One of the many inspirations for me to push myself were captured in these two pictures.  The guy in the blurry picture, well, he's a runner who has done a 200km ultra marathon and the guys with the balloons, they were the 4 hour and 4:20 pace makers.  My goal was to keep these particular runners behind me!!!

See that man with the umbrella, waving his hand, that's my main sponsor Wow.  He was at the end of the route and I could hear him shouting my name before I could see him.

He gave me an extra much-needed win to boot it to the finish line.

 And here I am, booting my tired-out, overly exhausted self to the finish line with a runner who had taken it upon himself to help push me through the last 1.5kms.

 Snickers was the first person who hugged me at the finish line, 
then I turned to hug Runner 513 and shake his hand.

I then waited in the cold rain for the man who had pushed me through 34kms, Runner 488.  I didn't know him beyond our 34kms together but when he crossed the finish line I gave him a huge hug and thanked him.

Both these men were so incredibly amazing to me today.  I hugged them both and gave them each one of the Hulk Smash bracelets I had worn during my race.

Another Hulkie proudly crosses the finish line from our Hulk marathon crew.

And then came Rocket.  She was all smiles and super excited.

With our medals on, we snapped numerous shots at the finish line.

Treated our Hulk crew out to lunch... only the best for our Hulk family after pulling such amazing finishing times!!!  Headed out to the most delish restaurant and feasted.

And while doing a marathon is hard, like one would expect, there's a lot of pain that many don't talk about.  I experienced many of these immediately after crossing the finish line and am sure they'll last long into the week.

This picture, that's me right at the finish line, it screams "I'M IN PAIN!!!".

According to my MapMyRun app, I had burned a little over 2,700 calories running the marathon which is pretty crazy.  What's even crazier was the fact that I couldn't really eat after it because my stomach hurt so incredibly much.  I also had puked at the 33km because of the pain and stress on my body. 

And while many of the men experienced bloody nipples from the rubbing of their wet clothes on their body for 4+ hours, this is some of the chafing I experienced.  I had put a Cliff Blok pack in my sports bra and this is what resulted from the plastic rapping poking out of my bra.  If you think this is bad, you should see what under my bra looks like, woozers.  I also have a bit of chafing under my left arm and right inner thigh.