Lordy!

Last weekend was the Spirit of Survival race in Lawton, Oklahoma. We decided to make a weekend out of it, so we drove down Saturday morning, had lunch at Meers Restaurant, and then drove to the Wildlife Refuge to do some hiking. You would think in a wildlife refuge hiking trails would be clearly marked and animals would be all over the place. Unfortunately neither of these were true! We finally stopped at the Visitor's Center and got directions to a trail. It was a nice hike, but there weren't any animals wilder than a duck. On the way out we did see some Texas Longhorns, so we took some pictures of those to help satisfy the need to see animals. Oh and Wendy bought a stuffed buffalo since she didn't see a real one.

After our fun in the "wild" we checked into our hotel and meet my brother by another mother Noel, his wife Dollie, Dan and his family for dinner. Noel and Dan were doing the run with me Sunday morning. After dinner we headed back to the hotel. Wendy and I decided to watch a movie. It was Mama Mia. And since I have nothing nice to say about it I'm not going to say anything at all.

Sunday morning can way too early. I met the guys downstairs at 530am so we could catch the 6am bus over to the race starting point. Our race started at 810am, but we weren't sure how long it would take us to get our registration packets so we figured better early than late. As it turns out, we could have taken the 7am bus and still had plenty of time, but we just hung out in the bleachers and chatted until it was time for our 10K.

On the website, they say that this is the hardest 10K in the world or something close to that. I didn't give it much thought, but now I completely agree! There was a lot of elevation changes (ie running uphill!) and at one point about 4 miles into the run it climbs 400 feet in 1/2 a mile. LORDY! It kept winding around corners and you would think it was about over, just to round another curve and see it still kept going up. Despite this, I finished in 65 minutes, about 5 minutes faster than the 10K I ran in April. I'm pretty happy with that considering that this course was much harder.

After the race we headed out of Lawton for a stop in Chickasha to go to a corn field maze. It was fun. One of the mazes was really hard and we had to call for a clue to get out, but we made it. After the mazes Zach got to shoot some pumpkins and corn cobs out of a huge air gun. Needless to say, that was a big hit!