Running with the Ward's: December 2009

This past Sunday Justin ran his first FULL marathon! I am so proud of him. He did great! I ran the half. I trained for about 4 months to finish in under 2:30. I ended up letting Justin use my Garmin GPS watch during the race so I was a little nervous about how to stay on pace. I had a pace bracelet on that said what time I needed to be at each mile. The only problem was, it took us a little while to cross the start line. So I was unsure of my exact time when I crossed each mile. So I just kept on running not wanting to slow down b/c I thought I was only on pace to finish in about 2:28. Well, I when I crossed the finish line, it was 2:27 and with the time it took me to cross the start line, I had a chip time of 2:15! I beat my best time ever and finished 15 minutes faster than I planned!

My parents met me at the finish line and almost missed me b/c I was ahead of schedule. We took off pretty quickly to go cheer Justin on at mile 19. Kara and her family met us there. Justin looked pretty good at that point. After he passed, we went to the finish line and met some of our friends and Justin's sister and mom. Our friend Matt met Justin at mile 22 and ran to the finish with him. It was so much fun to get to cheer Justin across the finish line and share in such a huge accomplishment!

After the race in front of American Airlines Center

Justin with his medal

Justin crossing the finish line - he is in black

Me at the finish line

Justin at mile 19

The mile 19 cheering squad

Better Late Than Never

Here is a quick run down of our Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving week. I took the whole week off and used the time to get ready for Christmas! I finished almost all of our Christmas shopping in two full days. Then on Wednesday I cooked and cleaned to get ready for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving morning Justin and I headed out to the Turkey Trot. This was my third Trot and Justin's first. It is an 8 mile race that starts in downtown Dallas. You wind around downtown right past the grassy knoll. Then you head over one of the Trinity river bridges and back over another. On the way back you get some great views of the skyline. But you'll have take my word for it b/c I didn't run with a camera. Actually, you can see some of the photos by clicking here and then searching for my bib number (1008) or Justin's bib number (1009). After the race, we rushed home and got ready for the Ward family to come over. We watched the Cowboy's game and stuffed ourselves. The Ward family left in the early evening and Justin and I enjoyed a quiet evening after our busy week. On Saturday, we went to the Baylor vs Texas Tech game at the Cowboy's Staduim in Arlington with Justin's family. We had a tailgate before and then almost cheered the Bears on to victory. We had a great time at the game and I can't wait to go back for Justin's birthday!

Christmas!

Scroll down to the next post as well...two in one day!

We got all our Christmas decorations up inside and out the week of Thanksgiving. We have had some surge issues with the lights on our tree so right now it is lit up with the exception of the bottom strand of lights. We are going to get a surge protector tonight and a new light strand and we should be good to go. We got a real tree this year and it smells great!

Merry Christmas!

Our tree is huge!

You can't really see but our nativity is on the china cabinet and the tree is decorated!

New Manager Training

This is a short post on what I was up to last week. I still want to post about our vacation and about Thanksgiving but those will take a little longer. I was in Orlando last week for new manager training from Monday through Friday. All the newly promoted managers for E&Y in the US and Canada attended. There were about 1,100 new managers there including about 9 from Dallas tax. We had a great time learning about managing me, managing clients, and managing people. We also had a reception/dinner every night to network with folks from all over the US and Canada. We focused alot on identifying our personality type and how to adapt our management style to fit other people's types. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, I am an ISTJ...in case anyone else has taken the test and cares :) One night we got to go SeaWorld. It was just us there and they had a couple of roller coasters open and then did a private Shamu show for us. Our CEO was there that night and they had him along with the other bigwigs go down front and sit right in the middle of the splash zone for the Shamu show.

Here is a shot of the drummers that lead us in a drumming team building activity.