Surprising myself

I've been having some experiences lately that have kind of blown my mind.  They've involved me accomplishing things I honestly never thought I would achieve. Not a false humility kind of "nah, I'm no good at that" but a "if I tried really hard, it's entirely possible I will still never be able to do that" kind of things.  Two of these things happened in the last week.

1. I got an A in my Statistics class.  Even as i write it it seems totally weird.  What?? Me??  I need this class to finish up my M.S. in Counseling and I've put it off from the beginning.  Honestly, I've put off statistics since I started college in 1997.  This is especially weird because my parents have both been statistics professors and that's what my dad did for 30 years.  Math has never been my forte and I stunk at calculus (senior year of high school) and probability (only math I took in college) so I generalized them to stats and was sure I'd hate it and do poorly.  Turns out, neither is true! This is a huge revelation to me...

My professor was awesome (think power point presentations with South Park characters) and by the grace of God, I conquered stats!  Now it's got me thinking that maybe I can do a Ph.D...

2. Somehow, mostly by accident, I ran a 5k.  How do you run by accident you wonder?  Well, I went with the whole fam to walk a 5k with our friend Ed and a bunch of folks to support Brain Cancer research.  Ed lost his mom last year and it seemed like a great way to support such a worthwhile cause.  So we metro-ed down to DC and met up with the 12,000 others racing.  I've been training for a 5k that I'm hoping to run in June with my 3 sister-in-laws but had no intentions of running this one.  When we started I told Chris I wanted to try to run a little bit and I'd come back or wait up for them when I got tired.  Then...I just kept running.  It was the perfect storm of beautiful weather, a flat course, beautiful DC landmarks all around us, thousands of people walking/running, and I did it!  I ran the whole stinkin' thing! 

Before this I had not run a full 2 miles without stopping to walk at least a little bit. By the grace of God i didn't see the 2 mile marker because if I had, I would have been proud of going that far and probably stopped.  But after the 2k marker, the next one i saw was 4k.  If I'd made it 4/5 of the way, i couldn't stop now! So, I just kept going.

I won't go into all the reasons this is shocking and unlikely but let's just say, I'm truly surprised and I must say, quite proud of my body for doing it!  So, my goal of "becoming a runner in 2011" is actually happening! I'm still kind of in shock. Whoohoo! Here are some race pics.

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The post race reward :-)