I was so tired last night that I didn’t have high hopes for today, but it actually went very well.

This course was a bit different than most – take the tram up the hill, run down. I far prefer going downhill to up, but going down has its challenges too, mainly holding yourself back so you don’t trip, especially since the roads were wet. There were also some long, slow uphills – in a car, and maybe even walking, you might not even notice the road was going uphill, but I definitely noticed. The weather was perfect – cool and damp, but not actually raining.

The running experience was very different too. This race allowed people to choose their own start times; you could show up any time from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm to start the race. So it didn’t really feel like we were running a race; Ginny and I went up the tram with just a few other people and we were basically alone on the course, except for passing some runners. I ended up ahead of her, so we really did run the thing alone. I kind of missed the cheering crowds from last night! :)

My running time was 33:14, which works out to 10:42 per mile (the race results use this format, whereas Nike+ uses the other. I trust you can keep up.). I was happy with that, especially considering it was my second run of the weekend. I was in 194th place out of 522 finishers, but that doesn’t really mean much without knowing how many of those were runners, since this was a run/walk.

There were vendors at the finish line, so we drank beer (Widmer), ate free ice cream and walked around. Ginny picked up lots of swag to give her grandkids; I was given a bouquet of “flowers” by a balloon artist. A good time was had by all.