I told my brother I would pick him up around 830 to head to Los Alamitos from his house in Corona. Los Alamitos is close to an hour away, so I assumed that we would have plenty of time to make it to the military base . . . and boy, was I wrong.
It had rained heavily the night before and three roads were closed or altered on the way to my brother’s house when I arrived at 845. He was sitting in his garage waiting for me and we left almost immediately from his house. The drive to Los Alamitos lasted an hour, but the line to enter the base was enormous and moved slowly. I was nervous and my blood pressure was rising as I did not want to be the cause for us to miss our race. We had to run to the check-in tent which seemed like it was a mile away from where we parked.
We rushed to check-in and realized that we were one of the last people to do so. The staging area was probably another half-mile away from the check-in tent so we were rushing to accomplish everything on time and eventually did, but I was stressed out. The good thing about being late was I didn’t really have any time to think about the race, we just set our stuff up, rushed to the starting line and within minutes we were off.
Everything worked out in the end, but it sure was hectic. I learned a valuable lesson at The Race on the Base and will be sure taht I am always early to my future events to make sure that all goes according to plan and that I am nice and relaxed on race day. My brother played it off pretty smoothly, but he did tell me we should leave earlier. I’m not going to say I’m stubborn and Rocky would never say “I told you so.” But, if I were him I sure would have.