my 2013 Running Book

I am fanatic about one thing post race: the first thing I do when we arrive home from a race is place our bibs in a manila folder. Two years later, this household of two runners turned that folder into a giant overflowed monster. I recalled a blog post I read a year back from my friend Meghann (mealsandmiles.com), when she created a running photo book, capturing photo highlights from each of her races, while putting the race bib and a date/time stamp on the opposite page. I anxiously waited for my 2013 race season to wrap up so I could create my own.

I created my book through Shutterfly - I signed up for email specials and every now and then, they send out a free photo book offer for their 8x8 book. That is too small for many of the race bibs out there so I upgraded it to the 8x11 book for a small fee. After shipping, my book cost $14 and was well worth it!

I really liked how easy Shutterfly was to navigate. I was easily able to put my time and date stamp on each page. There were many font options and page decoration add-ons. I kept my book simple with black pages and white writing.

The book opened up to 2013 runDisney marathon weekend when I ran the Half Marathon and Gabe ran the Full Marathon. I did a dual page of photos since I only had two photos of him and a ton of me :) 

On the second page, I put both of our bibs and our times. I will always smile at my bib from this event. I never turned in my proof of time and got placed in the last corral! I had one of the highest bib numbers I saw all weekend for the 1/2 marathon.

One thing that made me laugh while putting this book together is the realization that I take a ton of photos during runDisney events...that isn't the case for all others. While I have photos of every mile marker, those aren't the photos I want to be reminded of. Gabe and I participated in the Rock n Roll St. Pete Half Marathon a few weeks after runDisney marathon weekend and the only photos I had which were book worthy was a post race photo opp and a pic of a mimosa and my medal....classic. 

Even while on our first official run-cation to the Rock n Roll New Orleans Half Marathon, I didn't have a single photo of the two of us together at the race, so I opted for highlighting medal photos and vacation photos instead.

Then there's the big boy.....speaking of run-cations, NY was a fun page to do and I had a hard time picking out photos for this one! I had an equal amount of vacation photos and race photos from the NYC Marathon and wanted to make it an equal combo about our trip vs. all the marathon. This page makes me smile! Four months later and I still feel as if that was an out of body experience.

Then a whopping 6 days after I completed my first 26.2, I headed to Disney to run the 2013 runDisney Wine Dine Half Marathon. It was an amazing time and this is one of my favorite runDisney races to date.

I ended the race book with the finale of my 2013 running season, the Womens Running Series St. Pete where I took a girls race weekend with my best friend!

I love that all of these memories are now documented with photos and my race bibs. Keeping the race bibs for all this time came in handy and I love the result. After receiving my 2013 book, I instantly created one for 2012 using a Groupon. Thank you Meghann for such a genius idea!