Thursday, March 27, 2014

Little Rock Marathon

Brad and I both ran the half marathon for the first time since 2006 (pre-kids).  Starting the week before the marathon, the weather forecasts were crazy and changed every day; they included everything from rain to snow to sub-30 degree weather to start.  I didn't pay too much attention until closer to race weekend at which point, it looked strongly like rain with around 50 degrees to start.  The kicker was that the temperature was forecast to drop throughout the race with sleet and snow moving in later in the day.  Well, they called it.  Around 6:30 Sunday morning, the temperature was in the 60's.  By the time we got downtown, it was easily in the 50's and the first drops of rain were falling.  I decided just to go ahead and grab the poncho and ran with it the entire way.  Fortunately the rain didn't really start in earnest until we were on our way home but the temperature definitely dropped the entire time and the course was a bit windy.  Given all that, we both had great races.  I finally got the monkey off my back and broke 2 hours with minutes to spare.  Brad walked away with a PR, which was awesome especially considering the fact that his calf tried to give him issues several weeks earlier.  Brad was definitely ready to get out of there when I finished though.  Between the wave start and the fact that he ran about 7 minutes faster than me, he had time to cool down and his teeth were chattering.  It was good to get in the car and warm up and even better to make a pit stop for hot drinks at Starbucks on the way home.

 
 
The kids met Spiderman and Batman at the race expo the day before the race.  Josh was so excited to meet the "real" superheroes even though Emma tried to tell him they weren't real.


Sure enough, they were right about the rain and right about the sleet.  Above was the scene from the front door the next morning.  Unfortunately it was ice so no fun to play in and much more time to thaw.  Schools were closed Monday and Tuesday.  We are very happy to hopefully have seen the last of winter.

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