St. Louis Half Marathon

Well, I can check St. Louis off the list. Only twenty-five more to go, no problem! Yah, right...

For the first race in my half crazy project I flew to St. Louis with my Mom, my sisters Jaen, Elly and Becky and we met our sister Linda and her daughter Lindsay, who lives in the St. Louis area. We explored the shopping on Main Street in historic St. Charles, we visited a museum and learned about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, we visited the Arch and viewed the Mighty Mississippi River, we visited the Field House and learned about author Eugene Field who wrote Wynken Blynken and Nod and his father, attorney Roswell Field, who represented Dred Scott, and we visited the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It was a fun weekend just learning about all that St. Louis had to offer.

And then there was the food. On the first day we had breakfast at Miss Aimee's (scrambled eggs, quiche, french toast,); lunch at Magpie's (spinach salad with mango, strawberries and raspberry vinaigrette plus potato soup and strawberry crepes, of, and strawberry lemonade) and for supper Linda made flavorful Mexican dish with refried beans; the next day I got fried eggs and clementines, the Broadway Oyster Bar (burger and fries, fried oysters, clam chowder); Linda made us pasta with homemade spaghetti sauce and fresh strawberry merengues, after the race on Sunday I had chicken stir fry from a Thai restaurant with broccoli and carrots and soup too! I'm sure I forgot something and will have to come back to edit this paragraph!

But on to the racing news: On Saturday afternoon we stopped at the Chaifetz Arena on the University of St. Louis campus for the expo and packet pickup. I got my race shirt, my bib number, treated myself to some new Wright Socks and got some official race gear. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the St. Louis Marathon they also gave us cool duffle bags. I was happy to have it for all of the shopping that I did!

Race morning: Linda got up with me and drove me to downtown St. Louis for the race start. Thank you, sister! We left about 5:45 a.m. for a half hour drive to be in place for a race start time of 7 a.m. The porta potty lines at such a big race are CRAZY, seriously. Lines and lines and lines of people.

I lined up with the 12:00 mile pace group. With so many people to start ahead of me I didn't actually cross the start line until about 7:20!

I started out conservatively with an easy pace and maintained that as long as I could, until about mile six, when my right IT band tightened up so I had some pain in my right knee for the rest of the race. In the last few miles my left IT started to get tight, so I walked when I needed to and ran whenever I could. I did the best I could for the day and came in with a time of 2:58:28. The temperature rose from the 50s into the high 70s, maybe even the low 80s, before I finished. A lot of the other runners were walking too. I was hoping for a faster time as the fall races I'm considering in Europe have cut offs at 2:30 and 2:45. Can I possibly measure up to that??

What did my sisters think of the whole experience? The entire group came to the finish line and watched me and many other runners come in. They later asked me about all of the discarded clothing lining the course and they wondered what was up. For those of you who don't know, I'll fill you in too! When a race starts that early many runners wear old clothes that they can discard as they warm up. At a race of this size volunteers will scour the course after the runners to collect those clothing items and they are then donated to charity.

The other thing they found interesting was chip timing. All of the runners have a "gun time", an official time between the time the race starts and you cross the finish line. However, thanks to the lovely advances in technology, it is now possible to have a "chip time". We get a little computer chip device to tie into our shoe, usually hard plastic that has to be turned in, the new trend is making these as souvenirs, in St. Louis they had a reinforced fiber strip for us to put in our shoe. It works like this, there are mats at the start, along the course, and also at the finish, so you end up with an accurate time of when you cross the start and when you cross the finish thanks to technology.

Later that morning I took an ice bath and a well deserved nap! And then hobbled around for a few days. Now it's time to get back to training as race number two in Lincoln, Nebraska, is just a few weeks away--May 2nd!

Thank you to Lindsay for being such a great hostess and to Linda for being a great tour guide! I'm happy that Lindsay, Mom, and all my sisters were there to share a big race with me and I thank you for your support!