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.

San Antonio Recap

Decent weather, good food, great friends. Sounds like a recipe for a sweet weekend. Combine it with the energy and excitement from 30,000 runners and you've got it!

What would any trip to San Antonio be without a visit to the Alamo. I particularly appreciated the unbiased and evenhanded presentation of the factors leading up to the conflict. Texas - it really is like a whole other country. Having read Michener's Texas as a kid it was cool to see the site of the battle.

Here's Angie at around mile 2.5. Getting ready to hand off her extra hat and gloves. Her sherpa's were glad to have the gloves.

So this is what it feels like to stand on the side and cheer. I was glad I had brought my Turtleman cowbell. It was pretty quiet early in the race.

I was suprised at how little interest I had in running the race. Even going to the expo didn't cause any regret.

Here's the whole crew celebrating Angie's 15 minute PR. Wow! She was even so considerate as to run 3 seconds slower than my Grandma's time this year. Whew!

Here she is - Injured Runner Report #992-1. They document everything at the medical tent - even just needing a bandaid for a blister.

The Doc had to document putting a whippet in an ambulance to warm up at mile 20 of the Twin Cities Marathon one particularly cold year. That was their first (and perhaps only) veterinary incident at TCM.

Neither Anne nor I slept very well and we had an o-dark 30 flight out on Monday so the trip wasn't as restful as a weekend away usually is. Back to the hockey grind!

For those of you who have had concerns about a certain dietary anomoly of mine - never fear changes have been made. Stay tuned.