Dear Diary,
Sweet Baboo and I ran the inaugural Navy marathon in Corpus Christi on March 24. this is marathon number three for the year, of the dozen or more marathons we'll be doing for 2013. NOWDON'TMOCKMMEFORNOTWRITINGTHISSOON I don't really think anyone reads this anymore any way *snif*. And by the way, when I say 'ran' I mean that Sweet Baboo ran it, while I did my patented shuffle-jog and spent most of that last half swearing and hating south Texas and nervously watching seagulls, hoping they wouldn't shit on my head.
*Whispering* shhh, see, the day before the marathon, we'd had a stressful day. I'm convinced that pilots have conspired on Dallas to fuck up flights in the rest of the county. When we arrived in Dallas, our flight was listed as being over an hour later. Twenty minutes later it left without us. Fuckers. We had to sit separately. Then we arrived in San Antonio, rented a car, and drove to Corpus. Baboo was totally stressed, so he sat down behind the motel...relax...listen to the waves...and...
SPLAT.
a gull shat on my Sweet Baboo. He calmly accepted that this was how this day would end, and returned to our room to shower, where I tried not to laugh but instead to show the appropriate amount of sympathy, as a good wife does.
Anyway.
Sweet Baboo finished just under four hours, which is something I will never, ever, ever personally do. For him, however, it was a personal worst in road marathons for the last year. I spent much of the first half celebrating my awesomeness and the second half whimpering and wondering why I ever do this shit.
This may give you some hint:
At marathon start, there were THIRTY mile-an-hour winds rockin' and rollin' and we walked/ran against them for a mile or so. As you might recall diary, I had a bit of wind in the El Paso marathon in February and GodDAMMIT I'm sick of wind. I ran up and over a suspension bridge, which was pretty cool. At that point the wind was at my back and it basically pushed me over the bridge. Awesomeness. Except...something it pushed too hard, and I would stumble.
I ran down the road that winds along the fancy people homes along the coasts, and it was here that I finally accepted that the entirety of Corpus apparently wasn't a superfund site. Miles one through thirteenish were pretty great. I had about a 12 minute pace. I was a running GODDESS.
Obviously, that wasn't going to last.
Eventually, though, all good things come to an end, and I headed down across a causeway for four miles, during which the wind buffeted me from the side, so strong in fact that sometimes when I picked up my leg the wind would push it into the other leg. Yes, that's right. The fucking wind tripped me. Apparently, I'm built like a billboard. Or a sale. People I had passed gleefully the last six miles inched ahead of me.
Then, I turned around. Another long four miles of cross-winds, followed by five miles heading directly into the wind. I sniffled and wept and felt very, very sorry for myself as I watched my per-mile pace on my Garmin tick upward...upward...upward.
But I felt even sorrier for the people still heading out to the turnaround, one time shouting to one woman, aint this some shit? She just shook her head and tried to stay upright. I could run maybe for thirty seconds at a time against the wind before I would just give ip and walk.
Eventually, I trudged across the finish line around 5:42, which I have mixed feelings about. Got a big hug from Sweetness, and a rediculously big medal:
Then I got a wetnap bath, a subway sub, we drove back to San Antonio and flew the hell out of there. As soon as the late planes in Dallas let us. When we got home, we found out that inexplicably we'd left our car running when we parked it. Which is a story for another day.
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