Tico Tuesday, May 11th

A happy Tuesday to you all!
If you follow me at all on facebook you might know that I ran a 9.5k race on Sunday with two of my best guyfriends. It was a great experience! More details on that on the blog, but I have a few important things to share with you
-Everyone, thank you so much for your prayers, encouragement and consistent financial support! I'm in the black while many LAM missionaries are currently seeing red. Please join me in praying for God's provision!
-I have quite a list of current prayer requests, please read them on my blog
-AOL users, I don't think you got my e-mail last week. I encourage you to head to my blog to catch up!!
-GRADUATING GROVERS PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR NEW E-MAIL (or any of the rest of you that has changing e-mail/contact info)

Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles us. Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith... (Heb 12.1-2)

I got a new understanding of what it means to be surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. The start of the race was rough. There were people everywhere! (Almost 1200 people had signed up, I'm not sure how many actually showed up and ran though). It could have been better, had there been better technology. The Beach to Beacon 10k I ran with Mommy was great in that regard-everybody had a chip to tie on their shoe. To start our time all we have to do is step on the mat at the start line, and then step on the mat at the finish line and it read our chips and recorded our times. Much more accurate than the mad cattle-herd pushing start and the people talking into tape recorders at the end. It wasn't too bad for being low tech though. I just wish I could see the results somehow and see what place I came in. I know I finished in right about 52min flat. But it would be nice to know what place that was. I only saw the results for the top 5 women (and men). But, the woman that came in 5th had a time of 50:xx. If I had been 2 minutes faster I could have possibly won something!! (It would have been like $30 or so, not that like even really matters to me). That's some motivation to train well for next year! It would just be cool to place in the top 20. But maybe I did. I don't know!!!!!!

So originally only Albeiro and I were going to run the race. He and I have been running together once a week for several months now, and we upped it to twice a week about a month ago with future racing in mind. He used to run in races all the time in Colombia (and win them), but hadn't ever done a race in his 5 years here in Costa Rica. Friday night we were talking with Jorgito and telling him about the race. He showed genuine interest and so Albeiro told him (I'm not sure how seriously, I think he was pretty serious though) that he should run it. SO HE DID! Jorge plays futbol, so he is in pretty good shape, but playing futbol for an hour and running almost 10k are two very different things. So, he came in about 2 minutes after I did. Not bad for not having trained and signing up the day before the race!

The route was all downhill at first, and then pretty much all uphill the second half. Uf! That made it really hard to gauge my speed. I wanted to go fast on the way down, but I knew I had to save my energy for the big, loooooooong up.

I have fought a good fight I have finished the race, I have kept the faith! (2 Timothy 4.7)

Prayer Requests coming in the next entry!