My official race time was 30:51. That’s not great. I need to be much better about getting my ass out of bed in the morning to run.
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.