The tight turns were difficult, but they had to make the change due to the damage to the Omni Hotel. The original plan was to finish on Marietta and then turn into Centennial Park. However, the road is closed since there is still a danger of falling glass. They also had to modify the start for the same reason. They didn't want the race to have a left turn after a couple of hundred yards, but didn't have a choice. I work downtown, but not near the damaged areas. I was amazed on Friday when I walked to the dome to pick up my packet and saw how bad things looked 2 weeks later.

The thing I liked least about the finish was the bricks. What I liked least after that was having to wade through the walkers for 5 miles. For the most part it wasn't a big deal, but there were at least a half dozen instances where 4 or 5 would be walking abreast and all of them would have their heads buried in headphones and wouldn't know I was there. Thankfully, I didn't care about my time but if I was racing rather than treating it as a training run it would have really bothered me. I did make a rookie mistake of stopping before the finish. Again, didn't bother me too much. I managed to accomplish exactly what I set out to do, and I was apparently in exactly the kind of shape that I expected to be at this point in the year.