This past weekend I had the distinct honor and pleasure to take part in some friends marathons journeys. Jodi, who is in training for the Columbus Marathon the following week joined me to support Missi, Deb and Amanda. You can read her experience here. Missi and Deb are friends that I met back in April and for those that have followed my blog, know they are part of the "Cleveland 10 Miler girls" and are just amazing. I met Amanda for the first time this weekend after following her blog during her training and lives in Illinois. Missi is doing her third marathon. Deb and Amanda are both attempting their first. Deb ran in honor of her Mom, who passed away of cancer last year and ran with Team DetermiNation, raising money for Cancer research. Amanda ran for UPS for Downs in support of Down Syndrome.
Friday
Missi and Deb took an early flight out so they got to experience a fun day. Sightseeing and shopping. Jodi and I decided to drive or well, when we talked about going out to surprise the girls back in May, it was more like I was told I'm driving. LOL Headed up to Cleveland to pick her up bright an early. When I got there her son had a request....that I let Jodi wait for him to get on the bus...What am I going to say? Really? So I gave her husband another chance to go with us and he laughed. I'm guessing a quiet house sounded better.
For the most part, the drive was smooth. Got off an exit to find some food and hopefully a bookstore and there was nothing. Of course the lovely Garmin decided to take us all over the place EXCEPT to a road with an entrance to the highway.
Once we got back on the Interstate, we decided to find a mall at a main exit because I needed to get some books for the girls to finish off their gift bags. After finding everything, we left and realized we were right near Notre Dame. Not intentional but I sorta wanted to sightsee, never been there before. I joked if Jodi wanted to surprise her cousin, who is the starting long kicker for the football team, but we really needed to get to Chicago, especially before rush hour.
We finally made it to ChiTown, a little later than we wanted, but it is what it is. A scenic unplanned tour of a small Indiana town, dogs crossing the interstate, people singing in cars....We had our definitely had our entertainment as we drove. Not to mention numerous requests from someone in the car saying they needed to use the restroom....cough cough, not naming any names, but it was not me :-)
We finally made it to the hotel and hung out until Missi, Deb and her friend Mary Jo came back from their sightseeing of downtown Chicago. We sat and relaxed and talked before heading out on the town for some dinner. Headed down to the Navy Pier and decided on Harry Carry's Bar & Restaurant. It was a great dinner and fun conversation to end a long day.
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| Deb, Jodi, Me and Mellisa |
Saturday
Woke about and got ready for the day. Didn't have an exact plan, so we headed out to get some breakfast at a nice family run place, The West Egg Cafe. Then it was off to the convention center so Deb & Missi could pick up their packets.
The expo was huge. I mean it makes sense, seeing how the Chicago Marathon is the biggest in the U.S. We walked straight to the back to get their shirts and packet. After that we headed over the the DetermiNation booth for Deb to sign-in. Honestly it was pretty emotional watching Deb fill out a sign for her Mom.
Personally I think at this moment, everything hit her. The memories, the first marathon, everything became "real". I'm extremely proud of everything she has done.
We then just headed to explore all the booths. There was no ryhme or reason, since I was just following the girls. It was their weekend. As we turned the corner we saw a sign for Hal Higdon, who is a best selling author and the longest contributor to Runners World magazine than any other writer. Along with books, he also writes training plans for runners, from brand new to experts....I used one of his plans for the Cleveland Marathon and Missi and Deb got theirs from him as well. The best part though was when Missi realized Hal was ACTUALLY sitting there. She was like a teenage girl meeting Justin Bieber for the first time in person. It was really a cute moment.
There were lots of vendors and free samples of things and I'm sure we could have spent hours walking around. While the girls went to look for shirts, Jodi and I went to the Nike Wall, where all 45,000 runners had their names located in alphabetical order. We took some pictures once we found them and went back to see how the girls were.
During this time I had been texting Amanda since she had said she wanted to meet us, so she was nice enough to make her way back to downtown, since she picked up her stuff the day before. I introduced her to Deb & Missi and we decided we would make our way back to the shuttle drop off to find a place to eat since we had not had anything since breakfast. So we hung out, exchanged stories and just relaxed. I guess Missi and Deb were under the impression that we had known Amanda for a long time, so they were quite surprised to find out that that was our first meet up, outside of blogging and emails.
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| Amanda, Me and Jodi |
We decided to walk to the Navy Pier, take some pictures, walk around and just enjoy the great weather and company. Then it was back to the hotel while Amanda took a bus to her car. Of course I had to give her a hard time and remind her to smile and we wished her good luck in the case we could not meet up before the race.
It was getting late and we were all hungry, so just decided on pizza for dinner. Chicago deep dish, only fitting. Still is weird looking at pizza with sauce on the top, but it was really good.
The girls headed to bed, which I suppose was ok since they had plans early in the morning. So Jodi and I decided to head downstairs for a drink and try to figure out a plan of action for the next day. We busted out the "spectator map" and tried to figure out where to go, when to stop, how to get there. Of course I mostly heard "I'm just following you", since Jodi is slightly directionally challenged. heehee But we thought we had a good plan, especially since we had backups just in case. I was excited and nervous and I wasn't even running.
Sunday - Race day
Woke up bright and early. Jodi and I had our own itinerary and really had to just be prepared and not do anything to panic or disrupt Missi & Debs preparation for their day. Memo to self....When you are in a different time zone, change your watch. I may or may not have commented on how it was 6:15 and we needed to get changed also, since they wanted to head down around 6:30. Well, slight problem since it was really only 5:15, so insert foot into mouth. I figured if they were not awake, that at least got the blood flowing...LOL
The start line was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. There was a point where they only let runners through, and we didn't want to make the girls nervous, plus had a few things to get as well as figure out how to get to the train station at some point. So we took some pictures, said our good lucks and hurried on our way and told the girls we would see them at mile 18.
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| Deb and Missi morning of the race |
Granted, we didn't fill them in our plan to see them sooner. Headed off to the store to purchase our train passes, get some bagels and some flowers for the girls. Once we dropped stuff off at the hotel, we headed out and with the help of a friendly couple, made it to the station with ease.
On the train to mile 7 we met a guy...well, a 20 year old kid with an Ironman Finisher T-Shirt and hat on. Seeing how I really want to do one, I had to of course ask him which one he did, how he did, if he liked it, etc, etc. He finished the Wisconsin Ironman last month and was very modest with his answer to how he did....I did "ok". His sister had to jump in and explain that he finished 5th in his age group (18-24yr old) with a time of 10 hrs and 18 minutes, which is inspiring. I checked the site and he ended up 41st overall out of 1,630 men. For those unfamiliar with Ironman times, they give you 17 hours to finish in order to become 'official'. The high end/pro athletes do it in around 9 hrs. So the kid knocked it out of the park. He already was signed up to do Louisville next year and is hoping to qualify for Kona.
We made our way to the mile 7 marker and the train station just happened to be down the road from Wrigley Field, which was pretty cool. The streets were jam packed so we weaved our way in and out, found an open spot and snuck in to watch the runners. Being the really shy person that I am, we struck up a conversation with the people around us. One of the guys next to us was holding a sign that said "Chaffed Nipples are Sexy". The sign was a hit with everyone it seemed as the runners always laughed or made comments. Some even pulled up their shirts to show their bandaids. Unfortunately for me, they were all dudes that did that...LOL
We ended up getting text alerts (from the 10k mark) so we knew the girls were near and when to expect them. Unfortunately we saw them too late and they were on the opposite side of the road. Although Deb did turn her head as we yelled and maybe she thought she was just hearing things...heehee At that point it was back to the train station. We thought about toying with the idea of heading towards the halfway point, but decided it would be a risk, since the main deal and the main purpose was to be there at 18.
But we decided to leave and not do any of it and just drive home...Ok, ok, ok, just kidding...heehee
To be continued....
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