on halloween this year, mark and i were fortunate enough to complete the marine corps marathon in dc. we trained for about 6 weeks, which as you may know, is horribly inadequate. needless to say, we were both pretty nervous. this was mark's first marathon and my second. i trained for about 7 months for my first marathon, so 6 weeks was a joke and i knew it. up until about 1 week prior to the race i was wondering whether or not i was going to go through with it. BUT i knew that last year when i saw everyone on the metro with their race bags i was really sad that i didn't share in their mixed emotions of excitement, nervousness and general comradery. so, we ran. and as it turns out, we ran well. mark finished with an awesome time of 4:33 and i finished in 4:54, which happens to be 9 minutes faster than my marathon race time in 2008.

here are a few shots of us before the race. mark stretching and us freezing a bit before the sun came up:


i don't have any shots of us after the race since my camera was a in a bag and the bag was in a truck that was too far away for my jello-like legs to handle without a long rest. by the time we got my bag and took off my shoes, all i wanted was for the medics to fix up my toes (some unsavory things are still going on there, but i won't bore you with the details) and get home to rest!

a girls weekend in boston

long, long ago in a faraway land a few of us ladies got together for an extended weekend. since meghan lives in boston, courtney was visiting for a conference and suse was just a short bus ride away in nyc, i decided to hop a flight to beantown and have some fun. of course, we were all sad that rachel wasn't there, but knew we'd make up for it soon. since it's taken me 5 months to download the pics from my camera, i felt like it was alright to post about our trip now, even if it is so late in the game.

one of our first orders of business was to explore a local island that has an old, kind of creepy fortress on it. i think someone else got the fortress shots, but here are a few of us on the ferry:

and below is the lovely view of the boston harbor from the ferry:


later that night we decided to go out for a night of dancing and general good times. of course, it took us a while to get it together:


and finally:

once we arrived at 'da club it was a pretty exciting time, full of crazy stage dancing:

girls in skirts that left little, er, nothing to the imagination:

and boston's version of the jersey shore boys:

of course, we needed some obligatory historical boston photos before the weekend was complete, so we took our own educational tour of the city later that weekend:

and since we didn't want to take ourselves too seriously, just one quick fun shot:

what a great weekend, thanks ladies!