I write to you from a seat at Gate 26 in Las Vegas, *patiently awaiting my flight to take me back to Portland, where I will slumber for 6 hours and then excitedly arise to educate **eager young minds. And as tired as I am and will be tomorrow, I can’t help feeling stoked that I met one of my big goals this year. And as some of you may have suspected, I did not blow off the 13.1 miles of exercise for a marathon of drinking. Tempting as it may have been. There were moments when the signs for cheap beer sounded like a hell of a lot more fun than running/walking in the freezing cold. But I did it! I completed the ½ marathon in less than 4 hours..which is when they were going to start pulling people off the course. I had this vision of running and hiding from the shuttle vans that were picking up people too slow to finish the race. Actually that might have been fun now that I think about it.
So my goal was just to finish, and I wasn’t really giving too much of a rat’s ass how long it took me. I originally intended on walking the whole thing, but there were some spurts I just felt like running, even if it was just a couple blocks and I wanted to pass somebody because I was sick of staring at their asses. I ended up running a portion of each mile, so I was feeling pretty good about that. I was moving the entire time, with the exception of the 10 minute stop at the Honey Buckets. And NO, I was not in the honey bucket for the whole time….ewwwwwww!!!!! The lines were just REALLY long…although there was one really pushy grandma behind me who told me to hurry it up next time. What did she think I was doing in there? Having a tea party!?! You can kiss the fattest part of my ass, granny!
So after that, I was rockin’ and grooving to my play list and just taking it one mile at a time. Until I was on the ninth mile. That mile went on F.O.R.E.V.E.R. I had my I Pod on pretty loud, so I didn’t notice that mumbling to myself was actually out loud for others to hear. So when I “muttered” “Where the fuck is mile 9?!?!” a gentleman to my left told me we had passed it a while ago and we were coming up on mile 10. Oops. Well, 10 down…3 to go!
It wasn’t until I finished the race that I realized my feet were murdering me and my blisters were epic nasty – I was just too busy trying to get to the finish line. And when I did, they had just run out of medals for the ½ marathon, so I got one for the full marathon. Now I’m fully aware that I didn’t actually run an entire marathon, but that medal went to my head! I found myself checking out other peoples’ ½ marathon medals and thinking to myself, “Couldn’t hack the whole 26 miles, eh?” Never mind these people had the ½ marathon medals because they finished before me and were in time for the real deal medals. We’ll chalk it up to exhaustion and delirium.
Alright, gotta make this quick, they just called my rows for boarding! So congratulations to anyone else who has ever done a marathon or race of any kind, and kudos to those of you who can run the whole thing! Big thanks to the Dorwin family for hanging out with me and making the whole experience more fun!
*Lie
** Bigger lie
