13.1 stories

my legs have rested and i’m moving better now so i thought i would write out a few interesting stories from the half-marathon i ran yesterday.

  • i didn’t get to see this but pam did and told me about it – there was a 1.2 mile fun run that was organized along with the half marathon. the last person to finish the fun run was a 6 to 7 year old boy who had down’s syndrome. he had run the whole race by himself. when he got close to the finish line his mother jumped out to stand at the finish line. she began shouting to her son “i am so proud of you! you can make it, just keep running! i’m so very proud of you!” when the crowd realized what an amazing moment this was they all jumped into the act. the crowd began to scream wildly for the little guy. he was just focused on his mother and she kept shouting how proud she was him. the whole scene ended with him running into his mother arms and everyone else cheering. of course, pam couldn’t see this because she was too busy balling her head off.
  • the start to my race was a little more exciting than i had hoped for. i run with an mp3 player. when they started the race with my brother-n-law, sister-n-law, and i in the middle of the pact i pressed the “play” button on my mp3 player. it was at that very moment that my mp3 player fell out of its strap and onto the pavement. when i turned around to get it i was face to face with 400 people who were running straight at me. for some reason these people didn’t seem to understand that i needed to go back the twenty feet to my mp3 player. i swam upstream towards my player moving people out of the way. when i got to my mp3 player and reached down for it things didn’t get much better. now instead of me avoiding bodies that were coming towards me it was my hands quickly avoiding feet that were coming towards them. even though i finally was able to get my player back it was probably the scariest part of the entire race for me.
  • the water station at mile 6 was manned by men and women in red dresses – every single one of them. it was a very odd experience. some of them were very ugly guys in very skimpy dresses.
  • the whole event got me very excited about the music city marathon that we are going to in april. it was fun running with 1,000 people. it will be incredible running with 20,000 people. my brother-n-law is blogging about his training for the marathon. you can read his blog here.
  • i just found out from the race results on the mobile press register that i was 214th out of the 410 half-marathoners.

SIDE NOTE – i’ve started watching the dvd edition of the “firefly” tv show. it’s really good. too bad the series only lasted one year.

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