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This is going to be part 1 of a great weekend. You can click here to access part 2.
Once again, I managed to give myself a hard weekend. I mean outside the whole B2B thing. When I first looked into it, for some reason, I thought mapquest said 4ish hours. I was wrong. That Sunday night also started Rosh Hashona so that kinda complicated things but I figured it would be ok.
I'm going to document here my initial plan and then I will write what actually happened and then I'll go into full details for each day. As you shall see, it was a hard weekend...
The initial plan:
Reality:
Awesome right?
Let me fill in the blanks now...
So, Elizabeth said no to the car rental. I went to work Friday and finally left the house at 5:30 pm. I got stuck in traffic everywhere. The Cross Island Parkway sucked. The Hutchinson Parkway sucked. Whatever the stretch after it sucked too. They actually posted messages that the "next 24 miles will be heavy traffic". I think after that we cleared downtown Connecticut. Anyway, Elizbeth called me, 2 hours into the drive. I ASSumed I would be about 120 miles into my trip. I had managed to cover 45 miles. Think about that one for a little bit...
Between the traffic and the rain, well the drive sucked. The rain intensified at times and as it got dark, the drive got harder. There were stretches of highway, that don't have any lights and I couldn't tell if I was in a lane or not due to the heavy rain. The drive was bad. Really bad.
Thank goodness I called ahead to the hotel and told the I will be coming in late. Small rural place. Got there at midnight. The person actually offered to leave the room unlocked with the key inside. No thank you! Woke her up... Sorry.
The really nice thing about this B2B is that the Saturday race has a late start (9am) which normally would suck but with the travelling, it was nice. The Maine marathon has an early start (7:45am) which is great when you have to rush home.
The room itself was fine. Not a huge room but a King size bed. Slept about 4 hours and started my thing. One thing that was interesting to me or scaring me or something was that everytime I went to the bathroom (quite often of course), my hands would freeze. Wonderful. Still, a hot shower at the end was legendary.
Got to race site early. I was worried about parking but there was no reason for that. Lots of nice things about this race: Late start (9am), easy parking, race day pickup, indoor plumbing, showers afterwards available and generally a non-bloated race.
Got there, picked my stuff, did my thing, talked to people and eventually went to the start line. I was in a maniac picture (which I still can't find) and we started. By the way, I think a maniac sang the National Anthem and no one sat for it.
Right away I hooked up with a Canadian Maniac named Mary ( I think XX). There was also an older gentleman (another MM) who walked all the hills. We would drop him on an uphill and suddenly he would be right there with us. The three and at one point just the two of us had a good time.
We talked and joked and really had a good time... At one point, we were leapfrogging with this mom/daughter team and that was cool too. At one time, as we passed them, they were stretching against a tree. I of course told them they didn't need to hold the tree up for us. We all laughed. It was nice. They passed us again. We passed. On and on.
So, at our start, the full marathoners started as well as the 10Kers. The halfers started halfway in and we did eventually get to the 13 mile aid station and eventually the turn around point. That area was gravelly and I felt bad for the barefoot runner we saw.
As we headed back, we saw the daughter without the mom. Weird. We then saw the mom. She was drinking at the aid station. We high fived and continued, being persued by the daughter. Just about at mile 14, the daughter caught up. Mia ran with us and we talked. Apparently, the mom was adamant that Mia would drop her. She knew she was slowing Mia down. Mia assumed she would have a 5:30 finish and didn't really care but eventually she left mom.
Mary told me at mile 18 that she has to really slow down but I should take Mia with me. Sucks. I was hoping Mary would hold it together but the hills got to her. OK - time to go.
At the next aid station, we saw an asian runner who was having a hard time. It may have been a language barrier as well but clearly he was not mentally there.
We ran on. We saw her boyfriend at one point. Good guy. I think his name is ZZZ. As sweaty, stinky as she was, he hugged her and kissed her. Apparently he does that even after hot yoga when she's really ripe.
We continued. A couple passed us. We passed another couple to get to mile 26. Maniac number 1, Steven Yee, was there at 26.1. He took pictures which I still haven't found them. We made a right turn and just a little bit into the finish. Awesome. Her 5:30 estimate was a 4:37 in reality. Her boyfriend was there with a Coke for me - awesome!!!! Had some pizza and waited for her mom as well as Mary to finish. Ate, drank chocolate milk and went to the car to change. Didn't feel like showering but I knew I had to change clothes to help not getting chafed.
Talked to some more people... I didn't bring a shirt assuming I would use the race shirt. Turns out it was a long sleeve tech pink shirt. Oi...As another male runner said, "at least we're covered for Breast Cancer Awareness month". Yay...Yuck. Oh well.
Opened my huge can of Coke that I originally bought for Peasantman and drove to Maine. In the rain again...
The adventure continuees in part 2 of this weekend...
