Anyway, Sunday morning.  We made it to Alexandria and parked in Old Town with plenty of time to spare.  Caught the shuttle bus to the starting line on the GW Parkway, and as we walked towards the tent to pick up our race packets, someone shouted my name.  Preethy was there!  This was her first race (and she beat me by almost 2 minutes).  So that was really cool.  We had over an hour to wait before the race started, so we hung out with Preethy and her friend.  I hadn’t seen Preethy since her wedding last August.  (And her new husband, Bob, was nowhere to be found.  He apparently decided to sleep in rather than cheer her on.  I’m sure you can guess my opinion on that.)

Anyway, it was hot and humid.  Upper 70s by the time the race started.  TOO hot.  There were over 1000 people running in just the 5K, so you can imagine how long it took for the crush of people to thin out after the start.  The last stretch was just under a mile, all straight, and at some point we could see the finish line, but it was MUCH farther away than it looked.  Or at least it felt that way.  I thought I was never gonna get there.  Erik came out to watch (yay Erik!) and I heard him shout my name as I went by (I smiled and waved for his camera, but I think it came out blurry or something) and then I heard John shout for me from the other side, but by then I couldn’t even look.  It was all I could to just cross the finish line, and then it took everything I had left to keep from throwing up.  But I recovered pretty fast.  John did very well (under 25 minutes and 81st out of over a thousand).  So we (Erik found me pretty quickly) found John and then headed over to pick up our t-shirts and a bagel.  We didn’t stick around for the post-race party, though.  We walked back to our car to pick up clean (dry) shirts and looked for a place to have breakfast.  We stopped at the first place we saw (the Royal Restaurant I mentioned last night).  It really wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good.  We probably would have been happier at IHOP or something.  But it was good enough.  My calves were starting to tighten up, so we walked around for a bit and then took Erik home.  It was only 10:30 when we headed for home, which seems crazy to me.  How could we be leaving DC at 10:30 in the morning?  Right – we got there before 6:30.  Right.  Crazier.  We stopped on the way home to get a haircut for John (he wasn’t really sweaty anymore and he was wearing a clean shirt.  That’s not gross, right?  I didn’t think so), and then got sweatier and grosser by mowing the lawn.  On a side note, I don’t like dandelions.  I pulled a ton of them Saturday afternoon, and by noon on Sunday there were more!  I couldn’t have missed that many on Saturday.  Anyway, my point is that after the lawn and the grocery store, we didn’t have any other chores to do that day.  It was great.  And, like I said yesterday, we were exhausted, so it’s good we didn’t plan anything big.

John and I watched Be Kind Rewind last night.  It was cute.  Better than I expected, but also a little weirder.  And I just watched another episode of Dollhouse.  It’s not great TV, but I really like it, and I’m hoping they bring it back next year.

It’s also possible that I didn’t beat 30 minutes.  I’ll never know.  So you know what?  No more obsessing.  About this race. 

Turns out I have bronchitis.

First Question: How can I have bronchitis and still feel perfectly healthy (cough aside)?  I don’t feel sick.  My head is clear, I’m not achy, I don’t have a fever – and yet, I have bronchitis.  Well, whatever.  I’m just glad to know what it is and to have the right medication.

Second Question: Does this mean I shouldn’t run in the Herndon Turkey Trot tomorrow?  I was assuming an immediate no since, you know, I have BRONCHITIS, but the doctor said that as long as I start the antibiotic and other medication (robitussin dm and an inhaler of some kind), I should be fine.  It’s at 4pm, it’ll be about 40 degrees out, and I’ll be bundled up.   So I’ll be running a 5K tomorrow and then hanging out with my friends (dinner and Bond!).  Totally weird.

In other news, I have no other news.  Really.  Work was slow.  We had our annual office Thanksgiving lunch, so there were a lot of people in the office we don’t usually see.  That makes it sound like we brought strangers in off the street or something.  Which actually would have been a really nice thing to do.  No, I meant that the people who work in the Ballston office came over, and some people brought their families in.  We saw all the new babies (who I stayed far away from, I promise) and got to catch up with coworkers we really only see about once a year.  It’s generally a nice event (and we have a new caterer this year who’s REALLY good), but I didn’t stick around since I figured it wouldn’t be polite to cough all over the crowds in the conference room and kitchen.

Damn.  I just checked tomorrow’s forecast.  It’s going to be about 35 degrees and WINDY tomorrow afternoon.  A 25mph wind will make it feel like about 25 degrees, and that’s what I’ll be running in.  Makes me look forward to it just a bit less.  Just a bit.  Then again, I have already discovered that the Weather Channel lies to me, so maybe it won’t be that bad.

Anyway, the race started and I lost sight of John immediately (as usual).  I was trying to figure out which random people in the pack I would end up staying near the whole time.  There’s always someone I’m trying to catch and someone I’m trying to stay ahead of.  Today there was a short woman in a white shirt and a brown hat who was usually just ahead of me.  I passed her a couple of times, but never for very long.  There was also a woman wearing today’s race shirt (the shirts for this race are really nice – soft, long-sleeve, and nice autumn gold color) and long grey pants, tall, who stayed pretty much even with me the whole race.  We leap-frogged some, but neither of us could break away.  Finally, there was this girl in a light blue shirt who drove me crazy.  She was running just ahead of me, but then she’d stop to walk.  I’d pass her, and then a while later, she’d pass me, running again.  But she never got very far ahead of me, so what kind of pace was she running?  Fast enough to catch up and pass me after walking for a while, but not so fast that she never got more than 15-20 feet ahead of me – that’s a really weird, uneven pace.  And no, I wasn’t speeding up when she was ahead of me.  So that was driving me a little crazy ’cause she just didn’t fit.

The second mile was HARD.  It was all along this long, straight, hilly road.  There may have only been two or three hills, but they were big ones.  You couldn’t see the next one until you had climbed the first, so you couldn’t tell how many more times you’d be running uphill.  And no one likes to run uphill.  The third mile was mostly on the W&OD Trail, and that was gorgeous.  It was lined with trees, so the trail was lightly covered in leaves, and the sun had come out.  Very pleasant, even though the third mile is when I’m struggling and just trying to keep my feet moving.  I had planned to try to sprint to the finish, but I couldn’t see the clock and the line until I was almost on top of them, so I didn’t end up doing that.  I finished strong, though.  And I felt great when it was over.  We grabbed some water, walked around a little, and headed back home.  John wanted to stop at Melodee Music to see if they had a bridge for his guitar, but they weren’t open yet, so we had breakfast at the Georgetown Cafe in Leesburg.

The Georgetown Cafe is on King Street, just south of Market.  I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but have never gone in.  They had a sign in the window advertising chocolate chip pancakes, so we decided to go in (and then neither of us ordered chocolate chip pancakes).  Anyway, the waiter/host/etc (manager?) was Gary (I think), and was really nice.  A little goofy, but nice, and we’ll definitely be coming back.  I can see us becoming regulars (sort of – we don’t do breakfast out all that often).  He says he gets a lot of runners on weekends after races.

To wrap up this very long post, we had a yummy breakfast, went to Melodee where John did not find a bridge for his guitar, went to Potomac River Running to buy new shoes for me, and then came home.  We’re going to West Virginia in less than two hours, so I’m going to take care of a couple of things (like showering and packing).