Ascension Day

Ascension Day is a holiday in Belgium and luckily I was able to celebrate it as I did not have to work for once! Wednesday night I took a nap when I got home from work and set my alarm at 1 AM to wake up to watch the Penguins game 7. Which in all aspects ended up being a bad idea - the Pens were dominated, it totally screwed up my whole jetlag schedule, and I did not get out of bed until 1:15 PM when I had to run a race at 3PM.  But in all reality, this is the best training I could do for my Ragnar Relay in June as there is very little amounts of sleeps before long runs!  I grabbed the last water out of my fridge, went to Subway to grab a 6 inch and walk over to the starting line to meet up some friends so we could sign up for the race.  I was wearing a Purdue hooded sweatshirt because it was 8 degrees C and sprinkling and a girl in line ended up being from Indianapolis and have been living in Gent for 2 years because her husband plays basketball for the Gent team - random, but she won the award for first person making a comment about Purdue. 

The race went very well and the course was a very nice run, which I run part of it quite often when I run in the evenings so it was nice to know the course for a change.  I wanted to break an hour mark and I knew I was going to be close and of course at the end there's a steep hill up to the finish line which I saved some energy up for and I passed at least 30 people climbing the hill but I think about half of them passed me at the top as I was spent!  But, the last part to the finish was slightly downhill and I sprinted past a few at the end and was hoping it was enough to break the hour mark, which it was as I finished with a time of 59:00:19 so I felt good about that. 

After the race we went to a pub to celebrate and we made reservations to Amadeus - the famous ribs place - for dinner which was delicious as always.  I love Ascension Day and we had Friday off of work too because Labor Day is May 1st in Belgium, and it fell on a Saturday this year so we also got the Friday off in place of the Labor Day holiday which was nice.