Better Late Than Never . . . Maybe

So my sister Tracy, and the rest of my mom's side of the family (the Tracy Tribe) came into town for Thanksgiving weekend plus. I dubbed it our clown car Thanksgiving since our little story and a 1/2 house wasn't really designed for having 14 for dinner and lodging. We stashed half of them up at the lake and kicked Zman and JRose upstairs to the Doc's and my room.

Anyhow, I told Tracy she was going to have to run the Turkey Day 5k with me. It was surprisingly easy to convince her - especially when compared to the arm twisting it took to get her to do the run leg of the Rockman 1/2 IM with Team Lack of Enthusiasm (thus the name).

I even found this sweet hat online to get ready for it.

We had no idea what we were getting into. Sure Lifetime had several packet pick up opportunities, but we don't live by a Lifetime (and I didn't want a Friends episode type sales pitch).

We left the house 50 minutes before the race. It takes about 5 minutes to get downtown so we had 45 minutes to pick up our packets and warm up by jogging to the start. WRONG!

Downtown was a zoo. The Target Center was packed. They were out of shirt sizes XS, S, M, XL, XXL. This was on the level for pre-registration. It's hard to figure how you run out of shirts for pre-registered athletes, but they did.

We ended up getting to the line about 12 minutes after the start. That was far enough back to be behind ALL of the walkers, dogs, and strollers. I've never passed so many people in a race. We quickly abandoned running together. It was every runner for themselves trying to negotiate the crowd. Tracy and I were running about the same for the first 2 1/2 miles. At that point I started to get a little tired and wasn't willing to dive for every opening in the crowd. Tracy left me behind.



















I thought I'd include this pick of us before Childress finally found someone he could out coach. Lovie - you've tried 3 times from the 1. Take the 3 points on the road to go up 7. Oh well, at least now it looks like the Queens will be saddled with Chilly for another year.