I was looking forward to this past weekend for a long time. It was a three day weekend for me, it was Superbowl weekend, it was mystery challenge weekend for my brother, but I was most excited cause it was Rose Bowl Half Marathon for me.
With the Lacey Welborn designed shirts in hand I gave Zeb his shirt with bib number, 642, and revealed the mystery challenge. He was surprised and had a geniune look of excitement. I was releaved because he mentioned he wanted to skip the half and go straight to a full marathon but it worked with his planned training for the week.
We left the house arround 6 am to get to the Rose Bowl before 7:15, which apparently was a little early. They close the roads for the race at 7:30 and they told me 1200 people were going to be racing, so I thought it would be conjested… it wasn’t. We arrived at 7:00 and I told Zeb of my pre-race rituals, since I am a seasoned half marathoner with 1 under my belt aready. The pre-race rituals included people watching, using the restroom before a line formed and drinking a gatorade.
People watching at these events is a whole lot of fun espesially before the race. The serious runners are running/warming up, the not serious runners are yawning and the in-between people like the running brothers are giddy but a little ackward. But everyone is social, friendly and unusally excited for 7:00 AM on a Sunday.
We were surprised by our parents, who showed up arround 7:30 with big smiles and awesome running brothers shirts. We spent a few minutes searching for a place to get them coffee which apparently didn’t exist. I guess runners don’t like a quick shot of gut-busting coffee before 13.1 miles.
We headed to the start line at about 7:50 just in time to hear a less soulful but much more acurate version of the Star Spangled Banner than Christina Aguileria version later that day. After hearing whispers about how cool our shirts were we ran into another nervous runner who wanted to chat. She was a Mom from South Pasadena training for the LA marathon and the Half fit right in with her training schedule. She had a Garmin GPS watch which had some pretty cool functions but very little battery.
Zeb and Rocky on The Starting Line of the Rose Bowl Half Marathon
So we know we were only seconds from the gun going off. I strectched out my calf one more time and looked arround to see the 1200 anticpated racers seemed much smaller and then with little warning…BANG… the race was on.
Stay tuned to hear about my race: the first half, second half and post race. Zeb is also providing his step-by-step or if our knees could talk blow-by-blow account of day.