We are all in motion.

Post.

Well I went and did it......ran a half marathon this morning in my town!  I just really wanted to get those miles in, so made up my mind to try it this morning.  Didn't get the time that I would have liked had it been a timed official race, but could have been worse, and I have done worse.  I still just really wear out the last 3 miles no matter how slow I start out.  Of course I hardly had anything to eat yesterday and I didn't eat anything before I went out this morning, so I am sure that didn't help.  Anyway, it is done!

Ginny

Good for you Ginny! I had a similar "up sick all night skip the race and then feel fine by the next afternoon" experience when I was going to do a duathlon in Ohio our last day there last summer. It sucked. I should have done my own race like you did, but I just whined about it.

Morning Judy and Marjorie!

Tessa, hadn't thought about the timing very thoroughly. If I did drive, I'd probably want to leave pretty early on Friday to avoid as much of the New Yorkers driving to Connecticut for the weekend on Friday afternoon traffic as possible. You mentioned one time that RN was interested in the idea of the double - is she considering it as well?

Back at work - how did I get so behind after only taking one day off? Maybe it's just that I'm tired and everything looks bigger and harder than it actually is, but I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I didn't get home until late last night, then couldn't get to sleep, so 6 a.m. seemed way too early this morning. I did, however, take the time to fill out the pre-application for TSA precheck this morning and get an appointment to get that done. I got it on my boarding pass for the first time on my flight out to St. Louis, and oh my gosh, was it better than waiting in the regular security line. Plus no taking off your shoes and pulling out your computer and bag of liquids.....if I only fly once a year for the next 5 years it's worth it to me to spend the $85. I couldn't get an appointment until the week after my next trip in two weeks though, so I will have to struggle through regular security at least one more time.

Probably another rest day for me. Tired, plus we have no food for dinner, plus laundry needs doing, and I didn't even bother to open my bag when I got home last night, much less unpack. Good news though, while I was gone DH sold the extra wheels from my old car that were just sitting in the garage AND he fixed the oven! His relocation form got officially approved last week so he's finally found some motivation to get things done around the house.

Ginny, I agree with Marjorie, call that your personal stubborn ass half! BTW, congratulations on the win! Sorry you were not well enough to do the official half.

Judy, tornadoes scare me a lot. I'm glad nobody was badly hurt.

Karen, I'll check Thursday-Monday evening flights to/from BWI and Friday-Monday to Boston. Good thinking on leaving early Friday morning to drive from your home to CT since that is right through the NYC metro area -- especially since it is a holiday weekend. I don't think RN is likely to come, she has one son in private university and her other son is not a full time student so they don't get much financial aid. She's not going for 50 states at this point, she has 3.

Taking shoes off etc. doesn't bother me, but I have never been tagged for the express line so I don't miss what I haven't had! Funny to think that that used to be the norm, just a quick walk through a metal detector. I was behind someone a while back who was complaining mightily about the inconvenience of 5 minutes in line and having to take her shoes off. She turned to me and said "don't you think it's ridiculous?" I couldn't help it. I mentioned who I work for and that we lost 355 people in the north tower that morning. She stopped grousing after that.

Yay for DH getting some things accomplished!

Susan, congratulations on a successful quilt show! I have not chaired them but I know how much work goes into it. You must feel so relieved.

No run today as yet, I took Sis to the airport this morning. I will go to the gym at lunch, I'm giving back a final so pizza and wine are on the agenda and WI yesterday was not pretty.

However, I do have a race report:

Since DD is at university in eastern South Dakota and she and I drive her car home for the summer in May and back to uni in August, I’ve added a number of states to my marathon list by planning the drive thoughtfully and including a race whenever possible. This year it was Fargo’s turn. I signed up for the race and booked our itinerary accordingly. Fortunately both for the runners and for the residents Fargo did not have horrible flooding this year as it did last year.

We left DD’s home and drove up the interstate to North Dakota, a state neither of us have been in before. It was an easy drive and we arrived in Fargo in good time to meet Buggy (runango forumite), with whom we were sharing a room, dump our stuff and walk to the expo. Buggy had driven over from the Twin Cities and was also planning to stay the night after the race, so the sharing worked out well.

We had some challenges ascertaining the proper procedures for packet pickup at the expo, since the layout had apparently been designed to maximize the warmup walking that the entrants were required to complete (and not incidentally to have the entrants pass every vendor at the expo). Found our race numbers, picked up our shirts (fuschia and white with panels and logo on back that looked like an explosion in a paint factory), and walked over the bridge to look at the start line. Once we’d found that we had dinner and tried to get an early night.

We both woke up early on race morning, DD tried to sleep in though I’m not sure she was successful. Buggy and I got dressed, she left early to do bag dropoff and work her way up to the front. I stayed in the room longer – I could see the race start from the room and wasn’t eager to go out in the 35 degree morning before I had to, and I wasn’t checking a bag. Left at about 7:30 for the 8 AM start, walked over, stood in line for the portapotty, and joined the lineup just before the gun went off. It’s clear, sunny, and cool, and expected to warm up to 60 later. Many walkers and 10Kers were ahead of me, nobody seemed to have paid much attention to the expected pace signs – so what else is new?

Gun goes off and so do we. The first mile is around downtown Fargo and very crowded. I see quite a few elbows being thrown and some muttering about walkers, and I contribute a bit myself especially when there is a group of walkers taking up the entire width of the street. Slowly it starts to clear out. The full and 10K courses run together for the first two miles, the half marathon has already split off to cover the second half of the full marathon course. There’s also a 4 person relay for the full. Fargo wants to encourage as many participants as possible.

The first few miles go well, I’m holding a pace just over 10 mpm as we head north on the west bank of the river in residential neighbourhoods of Fargo. This is a very flat course, but it makes up for its lack of vertical change by including many changes in various horizontal directions. I’m impressed with the number of volunteers, there are two or more at each of the multitude of intersections we traverse. There are also a good many spectators out in the chilly morning, many of them ringing cowbells – when did this become a tradition for marathon spectators?

Just before the 3 mile mark the 10K and the marathon split, I think they’re going around a block and coming back the way we came just to avoid a turnaround that might confuse some of the marathoners. We now go on a big loop through more residential streets, aid stations about every two miles, flat as the proverbial pancake. There are bands playing at intervals, and one house has what looks like a church choir in front of it – not bad, I am tempted to stop and sing with them for a short while! Then there’s a group of about fifteen bagpipers, all kilted and piping away. I have to snicker, thinking of the poster in DD’s living room titled “Men + Kilts + Leafblower = Awesome”.

I talk to a woman named Jenna for a while. She is a math teacher in the area and doing her first marathon. We are running the same pace at this time and she could use the encouragement, I think. She picks up on thanking the volunteers and the spectators and we go through every intersection saying thanks and high fiving the little kids. Amazing how people clap more when they are thanked for coming out! They have a bunch of signs, among the better signs we saw:

May the Course Be With You

Never Trust A Fart

My Mom Runs Marathons. My Dad Just Drinks Beer

Smile If You’re Not Wearing Underwear

My Mom Can Run Faster Than your Mom (not surprising since my mum is 76 and has had a hip replacement)

Don’t Worry, I Poop My Pants Too (held by a tot in a stroller)

Six miles, then the first relay point. We dodge around the crowd of relayers and supporters and tell ourselves that everyone who’s passing us must be a fresh relay runner. Now we’re going back on the same road we came out on, the course has several out and backs with a big loop at the top and a loop near the end (more on that later). No marathoners still heading north, but we are now passing a few 10K walkers. We applaud them too. Jenna is feeling faster and she pulls away from me. Mile 9, mile 10, and we head west near the finish line area to bypass it for most of the second half.

I’m not able to maintain the 10:05 pace I’d been doing, darn it, but I am still feeling OK. We are back on residential streets after spending some time in a commercial area, people are out here to watch. A garage band – literally – they are playing inside someone ‘s garage with the door open so the runners can hear the music. Lots of little kids to high five. This is a good course for spectators to see their runners several times without moving too far from their starting point near the finish. Next band is – oh my – an accordion group. All they lack is a tuba. They do actually have a good beat with their selection of polkas and the troll figurines scattered around the front yard. I’m sure the neighbours love having that music playing for several hours!

We’re starting to see half marathoners coming back as we head south on an out and back just past the halfway point. I keep an eye out for Susan since if I’m going to see her this is where it is most likely that we will glimpse each other, she’s faster than I am, but I don’t catch sight of her. Second relay point is in sight, we go south on the west side of a schoolyard and north on the east side on our way back so the school can be the relay exchange, and we figure out later that we probably passed each other in that stretch. I see the 3:15 and 3:25 groups go by.

Further along we get onto a road right by the river, still residential. I see a big hole where a house used to be on the river side of the street. They must have had a fire? Then we see more holes in the ground where houses were and some houses up on pillars moved off the basement cavities. Oh my. Flood aftermath. I find out later that the flood damaged many of the houses along the river in Fargo and Moorehead and the government has auctioned off some of the houses that the owners walked away from or gave up. I think they should have considered buying them all and demolishing them in favour of a levee, but that would have been horrendously expensive and there would likely have been some holdouts. Some have been rebuilt, presumably the ones with good insurance and resources to cover the difference. One house right across the street from a couple of gaping holes is for sale. Yeah right, I would love to buy that one. Potential for swimming pool in the basement and all.

High school music department assembled in what is likely the band director’s driveway playing for the runners. When I go by it’s the strings and woodwinds, not rousing music but pleasant to hear. Then someone with earsplitting rap blasting from the speakers on his driveway, another neighbor pleaser. There’s such a thing as too loud even during a race! Finally we reach the turnaround at 16.3, turn and start back. I’m not nearly as far back in the field as I thought.

The high schoolers have switched off and we now have the brass and percussion players, more runnable. I wave and thank them. The field is thinning out as we make our way back up the riverbank and past the relay point. There are signs asking the half marathoners to stay right and the marathoners to stay left, presumably because for a while the faster marathoners were passing the slower halfers and didn’t want to be impeded. The 20 mile mat is on the right side of the road, I swerve to pass over it but talking to Buggy later and looking at results it appears that many full marathoners did not see the mat – there are a lot of people who are missing a time for that mat.

I need to go to the bathroom and when I find an unoccupied portapotty I jump in and feel much better after a short break. I am slowing down. The knee isn’t so bad, occasional twinge, but I have a blister on my toe and it hurts.

We go slowly north, back past the polka band and other music groups, still seeing the occasional southbound marathon runner. I pass one elderly gentleman who is running his 1300^th (yes that is thirteen hundredth) marathon and several 50 staters. I’ve seen a number of Maniacs but I don’t think I’ve seen even one TNT runner.

The race turns to go down by the river just past the 22 mile mark. One guy is waiting for his dad who is a charter Fargo runner, this is the 10^th year Fargo has been run (and apparently the 10^th different course!) and dad has run them all. We run through the park and then turn to go up the bank to a bridge. My toe is hurting more and I’m ready for this to be over. We cross this bridge, which is the same one we started on, and start our loop through Moorehead, Minnesota. I am not used to crossing state lines so easily – Angelenos are used to going a long way to get out of the state! We run down a couple of streets and then onto the Concordia College campus. They want to make sure we are going the right way, our path is marked by a line of yellow bunting either side and we are not to leave it. Wind through the campus and west back to the river bank, where we pass the 24 mile mark and I do my customary shout of “God Save the Queen!” Then we turn north for the last stretch of the race. This area was also affected by the flooding of recent years but the impact wasn’t as graphic as it was in the stretch between 16 and 18.

We run down by the river and then climb up to the northernmost of the three bridges to get over the bridge. I’m hobbling and not going nearly as fast as I hoped, but I’d like to be done by one and I may just make it, it’s 12:50. We cross the bridge, seeing runners who have finished and are walking back to their cars. Envy. I also see a woman in a Wonder Woman costume and can’t figure out how she got ahead of me, until I remember that she’s on a relay team so of course she’s fresher than I am.

It seems like a long last segment but it’s not very long in actual fact. I pass someone with – God help him – a half marathon bib on, using crutches no less, making his way to the finish line by sheer force of will. That takes guts. I get to the left turn, see someone in a purple tank top and put on the gas to pick her off. I pass her. Then a spectator, another woman, starts shouting at Purple Top to pick it up, Purple Top complains she’s tired, and the spectator jumps in to run with her friend. They speed up and pass me. And then they cross the finish line together. I hear my name being announced and I summon up a finishing sprint and get a gun time of 4:57. That means I have a chip time well below that since I only started at 8:08 or so, and I find out later that my chip time was 4:48.

I am furious at the spectator, not so much at Purple Shirt, but I turn to them and say “You could be DQd for that.” They have no idea what I am talking about. I don’t want to make a big deal of the action in front of the race officials, but the spectator was apparently in the 10K and while I don’t worry about people running friends in I do not like the run in being extended to and across the finish line. I accept a medal from one of the volunteers, say no thank you to a water bottle or a mylar blanket, and head off in search of the diet Coke I have been wanting for several hours. The ice cream shop we saw last night is closed, but the Subway is open and I purchase a diet Coke and nurse it as I walk back to the hotel. Shower, cleanc lothes, and more diet soda and I feel human again. Susan came in over an hour ahead of me and is already cleaned up when I get back to the room, which works out well.

Fargo is flat, reasonably fast, and almost all on concrete. I think the organization was good, the number of voluteers is impressive, and the spectators were of high caliber.

Quick check in...

Crazy Sue, what beautiful quilts!

Tessa, great report, as always.  You have an amazing memory for details of your races!

Ginny, congrats on the 1st place finish in your stubborn ass HM! 

Hi to Karen, Marjorie and Judy.

Waves to everyone else!