Oh, The Blessing

I'm not even where to begin with this one. Maybe it started this morning, when we went to grab some Gu and found we were out. 14 miles was going to hurt with no Gu. It was a small misstep, the first of many tonight. Then lets fast forward to the 2pm slab of icecream cake, very tasty, very bad idea. I had to eat it, it was for my b-day. 4 hours before gun time, I'd digest it (around mile 8 I was cursing it).

Now lets move to the drive down to Narragansett. A 50 minute ride took close to 2 hours. We sat on Rte 1 for 12 minutes waiting to get off the highway, debating if we would make it in time. We parked the car and had 8 mins to get the half mile to get our numbers and hit the starting line. We thought we might actually make it when we could see people lined up and then the gun went off. Can we please catch a break?!? Oh well, we keep jogging to the registration table, only to find they didn't have our on-line registration. I wasn't about to fork over another $60 for this. They were nice enough to take our word for it and give us new numbers. At this point we are pushing 10 minutes past 6, what's the rush?? We took our time, hit the restrooms and finally headed to the now empty starting line.

It was pretty funny that we were running alone for the first 2 miles. I wondered if it would be like this the whole time, luckily we caught up to the pack of the pack just before mile 3. Our official time for the first mile was 19:05! Hysterical!! Now I had planned to time ourselves and realized at mile 3 I hit the wrong button and my watch had not been running since the start. Nothing else can go wrong, please!! It's too bad, I'm not ordinarily focused on comparing my times from year to year, but had been curious about this one. Now I have no idea, I'm not sure how far off we started from the gun time and didn't push go on my watch when crossing the start line. I do know how it felt. Much better than last year, a lot of that had to do with the weather, it was perfect for running. Muted sun, cool breezes, low humidity, last year was nothing but hot brutal sun. Maybe because we didn't start with everyone else, or because we have more confidence but this year felt comfortable and enjoyable. For most of it we were smiling and joking, who cares when you finish when you started dead last!

After finishing, all I wanted was water. Too bad there was none to be found. We didn't have much time to complain because the race was 10 miles and we ran a mile before starting, leaving 3 miles to run at the end. I wish I could say our good times continued for these miles, but they were terrible. We called it after 2 when we passed the car. Not shabby, I'll take it. Next year I won't eat icecream cake, I will have Gu and I will take a half day off of work and I will only run the 10 miles. All that said and done, I'm glad we ran, even if it truly was our own race!

Days till NYC: 99
Miles trained today: 13