And now the fun part!

Guess I'm a runner now.

The race is over; the rainy riverside course was gentle enough to let me set a new personal record with 28 minutes, 34 seconds. The other runners were amazingly friendly and helpful, and even spoke English fairly well. They helped me figure out where to turn around and run back -- running in the rain means running without my glasses, so I couldn't read any signs.

Technically I guess I won; there were only two runners in the 5k today so there are no official results. But I was the first one back and I got a medal, so that's more than good enough for me!

The next step is gathering up all the donations and ordering the computer for the kids. I'll be doing that on Monday, and I'll post the final total then. Thanks everyone for taking part in this and for supporting me. In particular, thanks to Susan for getting out of bed insanely early twice to go up there, encourage, motivate, and take photos. If you don't have a Susan in your life, see if you can get one, because then you will run faster, work harder, believe stronger, wake up earlier and just generally be more awesome.

This was fun, guys! Let's do this again sometime and see if we can brighten some more days!