Spur of the moment

You know me, I'm not a spur of the moment kind of guy. I'm a planner. It once took me 14 months to buy a car. I put money away every month for Christmas so I can pay cash for presents. My grocery list follows the order of the aisles in the store. I buy extra socks and underwear that I don't wear so I always have spares. I find an event, train for it, then on race day I pound it out. On June 24th I decided to do the Seattle Rock n Roll Half Marathon. On June 25th I ran it. Crazy!

The story is this - my friend David had signed up for the Half and ended up hurting his ankle so he couldn't run. At the last minute Sharon decides to take his place. She calls me and says that I should come with. "Come with" turns into "run it with me". But how could I? After all it was tomorrow and what was she thinking??? Who has the wild eyes now? Not me baby. I pondered it and figured I could jog it and tackle the 13.1 miles (though I had not covered that distance since last year). One more thing, I would bandit the race. Not pay for it. No race number. No timing chip. Of course I printed the rules out and it clearly stated that without a race number you would not be allowed on the shuttle bus. I told Sharon this and she replied "It's no big deal, they won't check". I argued of course because it was after all a rule. I became a little pissy but in the end we concluded that she would pick me up at 5:00am the next morning.

As we arrived at the shuttle point we were shocked to see thousands of people already in line. We walked around the Westin hotel looking for the end of the line which we finally found after walking around the entire building. I don't know how many days were were in line. Ok, minutes but it was nearly 45. We finally were loaded on a bus and the thought of sitting down for the 20 minute ride was heaven. Oh know, we're on the bus and it's full. We have to stand (Sharon ended up sitting on the floor). I'm already tired and we haven't started the run yet. Bus drops us off to a sea of people. I think over 25,000 people ran plus volunteers, cops, etc. A crap load of people. Of course we needed to use the port a potty in order to lose a few precious pre-race pounds. The lines were huge! In fact all 25,000+ people were in line in front of us - or so it seemed.

Business taken care of, we proceeded to our corral. Lucky number three it was. On the way I turned my Garmin on only to find that my pace wasn't working. I had monkeyed around with it to get it set up for biking and clearly screwed the pooch. No time to try and figure out how to set it up properly. Yes, I used some colorful words that I won't repeat here. How could I run a half without my Garmin to help guide my pace? It was what it was. We moved on. We were late. Corral three had already left. By the time we walked past folks to get to the front, we were in corral 27. F! This meant thousands of slower runners in front of us and we were smack in a pack of 11-13 minute milers. So what you might think. Wrong. Slower runners mean that you have to dodge, run around, and more or less always be looking 5 yards ahead to find your spot to run through. We did this the entire race. I ran back and forth, on sidewalks and grass, and ended up running 14+ miles.

At mile 7 I yelled out a thank you to the band and commented to the girls running near me that I could use all the energy I could get. One responded that it was mile 7 and I looked like I had only just started the race and I didn't need any more energy. As I left them in the dust it occurred to me that I wasn't tired. I was actually having fun, smiling, and felt pretty good. What the heck was going on with me?  By mile 8 I was hot and took off my shirt (easy now girls) and tied it on my head. The air on my sweaty chest cooled me off and felt good. That read like something from a romance novel. "Slowly Michael pulled his shirt up and over his well tanned broad shoulders....". I hit mile 11 and my phone buzzed. Yes, I was running with phone in hand. It was Sharon and she had just finished - dang, two miles ahead of me. She is stronger and faster I won't deny that. I made a weak attempt to run and text back "mile 11" to give her an idea of where I was - ever text while running and passing people? I'm sure some folks weren't happy with me. Mile 12 had hundreds of people cheering and I loved it. However that mile seemed to go on forever. Finally the home stretch was in sight and holy heck, I felt good. Sprinted a bit for a good show at the finish :)

We grabbed our finishers medals, water, and were off. We had a 2-3 mile walk to the car ahead of us. We joked and laughed about the run. Sharon killed it but doesn't like me to post her metrics so I will leave it with this - she's frickin impressive. I thanked her for asking me to run the half, for pushing me out of my comfort zone. I learned that I am capable of doing more than I have. My time was probably just under two hours and I hadn't trained for this, didn't push myself at all during the race. My body may not be 100%, but it can handle more than I've been pushing it's way. Without a doubt or a moment of hesitation, I'm all in - let's see what this baby can do.