Rockin' and rollin'

As I alluded to yesterday, Tina and I ran the 1/2 marathon today. It sounded like it would be fun. 20 bands along the route and lots of cheer squads, etc. Another inaugural 1/2 under our belts. The guys and a couple of pups along to watch. Fun right? Well, it turned out to be more of an adventure than fun.

I guess I did a little too much relaxing yesterday and not enough planning because I barely remembered my race chip and forgot my bib number. We didn't really have time to go back and get it, but I wasn't sure I could run with out it. We navigated our way around the traffic and found a parking spot. Once we got to the race area I headed to the 'Solutions' booth to find out how to get a new number. Just when I got to the front of the line, the generator that was running the electronics died. Out of gas. Okay, they're sending a guy over to fill it up and restart it. See, they needed the power to initialize my new chip. Each chip is evidently assigned to a bib number and since I needed a new bib, I also needed a new chip. Okay, so we're waiting and waiting. It's now about 15 min to race time. People are getting antsy. Finally the guy shows up with the gas, pours it in and....oh, wait that's not a diesel generator. Great. Generator ruined. They did come up with a work around solution, but it was getting really close to race time. I high tailed it back to where I had left the gang and just made it.

Neither Tina nor I had a great run. I think there's a reason we're only supposed to do 7 miles a week after the 20-miler. The body needs some serious recovery time. It was also a bit warmer than we've gotten used to running in lately. Anyway, we dragged ourselves to the finish line in 2:29. If we had been feeling good I think we could have easily beat the Disney time.

A couple of notes. While it's cool that they had a bunch of bands, you could really only hear them for a couple of minutes at the most, so it wasn't as motivating as I thought. As we were going past, oh mile 5.5 or so, we saw the 12 mile mark on the other side of the road and the elite runners were starting to come in. Man, those guys (and gals) were moving. The guy in first place, a Kenyan, looked like it was no effort at all. Amazing to watch. Turns out he ran the second fastest time on American soil, 1 hour 22 seconds.

The best part of the run was when it was over. :-) We grabbed some chow and headed home for a big long nap. Hooray for naps!