Last week, a girl, Mallory Rae Dies, here in town was hit by a drunk driver while she was crossing the street with some friends around 1am. The driver sped off, and after witnesses tried to convince him to return to the accident, he sped off again and crashed into a palm tree. Mallory was in the hospital for five days and there was some hope she would make it. She was taken off life support Wednesday and passed away shortly after (the driver of the car was charged with murder, among other things, and is in jail). I didn’t know her personally, but we had many mutual friends, including my bootcamp instructor. It is such a sad situation, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week. And on Thursday, my bootcamp instructor posted something on Facebook that really stuck with me:

I thought about this my entire run on Thursday and just kept speeding up until I was sprinting as fast as I could, and it really felt so good. Sometimes my runs are really tough and I just keep thinking, why are my legs so heavy, why do I feel like this when I’ve been training, I feel like I’m taking steps back… but it’s really important to keep in mind that I am thankful that I can even run, and it could have been any one of us hit by that drunk driver and it could all be over. I’m reminded often why Jeremy and I have decided to drop everything and travel around the world.

In other news, while I was sprinting, a guy with his dog started sprinting too and we raced each other for easily a half-mile, and then when I slowed down I looked over at him to give him a thumbs up, and he definitely pretended like he didn’t notice we were racing and ignored me… great.

I ran the Elings Terrain Festival 5k yesterday, and it was really fun. The course is really tough, there are all sorts of different kinds of terrain to run on, including a huge hill made of sand, steep muddy trails, stairs, etc. I finished in 30:50, which I was happy with considering it was a trail race. After all, that used to be my normal 5k time.