Half Marathon Highlights

It was a cold and windy day for the half marathon. I’m pretty sure that the weather was better for the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot in the U.P. a few months back. (Plus, there was pumpkin pie to look forward to.) This should have been enough to keep me in bed, but my stubborn pride – combined with my entry fee – managed to drag me to the starting line. I won’t bore you with the details and will instead just share the highlights:

5.) Despite my best efforts to sabotage my training, mainly by barely training at all, I still managed to finish in a semi-dignified manner. No bones were broken and no muscles were pulled. My only complaint was that by the end, because of the cold and the wind, I felt pretty much like a Klondike bar, just not as delicious.

4.) I got to feel what it was like to turn a corner and find yourself suddenly running into gale force winds of the type usually accompanied with airborne cows and other large objects not firmly anchored to the ground. Fun!

3.) I wasn’t disappointed in my quest to encounter at least one runner who apparently doesn’t know what headphones are, and who instead blasts terrible music from a portable device strapped to their arm, since it’s obvious, at least to them, that whatever they’re listening to is exactly what everybody else around them wants to, also.

2.) There were people I knew at the race, cheering the runners on. This is the first time this has ever happened to me, and I’ll admit that it was pretty fun. Not that I handled it well, mind you. When I saw somebody I knew cheering along the course, I always wanted to do the polite thing and acknowledge said cheering. Unfortunately, this didn’t go well. I couldn’t cheer back, as that seemed weird – at least for me. Doing a manly head nod didn’t seem like it’d be enough of an acknowledgement. I probably should have just gone with a simple wave and smile, but I instead decided to try and come up with humorous remarks to blurt out as I ran by. Unfortunately, my body was devoting upwards of 98% of its processing power to keep me from collapsing into the ditch, so that left precious little resources to come up with something humorous to say. This resulted in me stringing together several words that in a best case resembled the earliest stages of a humorous comment, but which still needed major refinements before they could even be considered a bad joke, and mumbling them as I ran by. With that in mind, to anybody who may have been there and wondered what I doing, sorry about that. Next time I’ll just smile and wave.

1.) This is by far the absolute number one highlight: I got to see a chick execute a picture-perfect snot rocket. All guys are masters of the snot rocket at birth, since it’s embedded deep in their DNA, but this may have been the first time I’ve ever witnessed a girl attempt, and successfully land, one. I should have proposed to her on the spot.