Half Marathon Whim

Friday afternoon Geoff and I drove Simon over to packet pickup for his marathon the next day. He had come into town to run the Inagural National Marathon hoping to qualify for boston. (Which he did!! Ya Simon!). As we are waiting around for Simon to finish registering , Geoff turns to me and says 'Look, we can still sign-up for the half marathon. Want to run it? Do you think you could?' So what can one say when asked if they are up to the challenge of running a 1/2 marathon? Mind you the longest I had run in quite some time is no where near 13 miles. The best reply of course is 'Why yes, could you?' As you can guess it didn't take us long to convince each other to run the Inagural National Half Marathon together for fun.

So early the next morning all three of us put on our race numbers and running clothes, while Alexis, Simon's girlfriend (who is also here visiting) is getting ready to cheer us all on. Thanks Alexis for all the great race pics!

Off we went at 6:58am from RFK stadium. Actually there wasn't enough porta-potty's so we had to wait around until after the started. So off we went after the race started, chasing down the rest of the runners. We were the last to start but we didn't care, they used chips for timing. Geoff and I decided to run together and make it a fun run. And fun it was! We ran down Indenpendence and Constitution Ave. right by the Capital, the mall and the White House. Then down to the Tidal Basin and back around. We did the majority of our miles around 8:10 min/mile pace. I finished with a time of 1:47 and Geoff 1:46 and some change.