Mardi Gras Half-Marathon

Here's a little race report for the Mardi Gras Half-Marathon that I ran with my bestie from high school on February 13, 2011. It's photo-heavy.

Background: Every year, my best friend from high school, Rachel, and I run a race together. Something fun. We always wear tutus and some sort of obnoxious headgear. This time, we went for tutus and Mardi Gras masks on our visors. We always take pictures with the bands on the course, too.

Here we are at the Expo:

Pre-race: It was f-ing freezing! We walked from our hotel to the start and stopped for some hot beignets and cold OJ on the way. Delicious! Arrived at the start and tried not to shiver.

At the start in our amazing outfits:

Race: It took a few miles to warm up and relax. We had a great race. Averaged 9:15 min/miles, which is good for us. Stopped to take a picture with every band along the course, so that increased our finish time to 2:10. I'm totally okay with that!

We always, always do devil horns for our first pose:

We are really, really buff. As Rach said, our big muscles scared away the band:

When two crazy girls see a band made up of elderly musicians, they assume the appropriate pose is Rock On!

This pose is a new entry into our repertoire. Walk like an Egyptian. Instant classic. It will be used again:

We refer to this as the Cali pose because we're both baffled that everyone in California poses like this for pictures. Peace sign? Gangster sign? We don't know. We're from the Pacific Northwest, but we go for it anyway. Bonus points if the pose is used in front of a d-baggy band.

Yes, it looks like we're sniffing our armpits. We're not...we're channeling Chuck Norris and Tony Horton and kissing our huge biceps.

Air guitar. Always a classic. Legs were a bit stiff from the cold.

Yippee! We're done! Good job, us!