The sun has been shining for a week straight, reducing the once-mighty piles of snow to little mounds of white against the grass...I actually took this shot yesterday morning, and the pile has melted completely in the meantime.
Even the dog water bowl is back to its happy non-frozen self, and the dogs are no longer whacking their noses against it trying to get a drink...
Yesterday morning was so pretty, I took my midmorning tea and cookies outside to enjoy. The sun shone white against my closed eyelids as I soaked up the warmth. Heaven!Today was a very busy day. I had to drive almost an hour each way to pick up my race packet this afternoon. It turns out there are 3300 runners in this race tomorrow!! Who'd have thought there'd be so many masochists willing to do five miles in the rain?
Pickup was marred by the police pulling me over just a few blocks from my destination. Mapquest had me rather lost, and in my zeal to figure out where I was supposed to turn, I apparently made a right turn without stopping at a stop sign first. (Oops. I never even saw the damn thing!) There was no opposing traffic and I did not endanger anyone, but the cop clearly saw me do it and felt duty-bound to write me up. Yaaaay. [/sarcasm] This race just got a lot pricier.
Once home with my now very expensive race packet, I unloaded all the goodies. The red thing on top of my race number is called a D-chip. It will time the race for me. The race organizers have these metal plates on the ground at the start and finish lines, and some sort of RFID in the chip is triggered to measure your start and end times when you cross the metal plates. In a race with 3300 runners, this could definitely come in handy.
It's called a D-chip because of the shape it makes when you wrap it around the laces of your running shoes.
Ta-da! The D-chip and my now-unobscured race number. I would be delighted if I actually came in 478th out of 3300 people, but I suspect I won't do nearly that well.
I am going to try this Clif Shot energy gel as my mid-race pick-me-up tomorrow. It's strawberry-flavored, or claims to be, and has 25 mg of caffeine. I guess I'll down it between mile 3 and mile 4 somewhere. I have a course map, but it doesn't have any mile markers or indications of where water stops will be, so I'm going to have to play it by ear.
I am such a dork that I actually pinned on my race number and put on exactly what I'm going to wear tomorrow, just to make sure I had everything. I should look a lot like this tomorrow--only wetter.I am also taking a towel, my exercise mat to stretch on afterwards, a full change of clothes including shoes, and pretzels, M&Ms, and a Clif Bar to snack on after the race. And I have my directions and course map printed out, so I think that should cover everything.
My goals for my second race are not very different from my first race, a 5K I ran in October 2009:
- Don't injure myself.
- Not being last would be nice.
- Have fun.
Must get to bed now--wish me luck!
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