Tomorrow's race

Yesterday, I went to the Running Expo to register for the half-marathon tomorrow.  Typically, I do not wait until the last minute, but I was on the fence about the race for quite some time due to injuries earlier in the year.  The injuries have been healing nicely with physical therapy though I think this is mostly because I am no longer standing for 8-10 hours a day every single day. When I tried to register on the last day, I missed the online registration by 30 minutes.  I guess the deadline was 12am that day and not 11pm of that day.  I could have been a stickler about this, and I even thought about running as a "bandit" (these are people who just  run the race but are not actually registered, thus not paying) at one point.  But, my ethics would never let me do that.

When I went to register, there were quite a lot of people, so I no longer felt dumb for registering late.  It was good I went yesterday, because there was apparently a ten mile wait on the interstate just to go to the Expo today.  Yikes!

I browsed the Expo.  This one is pretty nice, because it is a huge event--over 19,000 entrants tomorrow for the half and full marathons. An additional 10,000 for the 5k, 10k, relay, and other events today.  I was proud of myself for NOT buying much.  The only thing I decided to buy was a headband and participate in a fundraiser/raffle of which I know I have no hopeless chance of winning.  It was one of those "how many pigs are in the jar" contests.

The issue of which headband to buy was an interesting dilemma.  There were 3 different groups-sweatybands, bondibands, and chicabands. I tried to see what the differences were of each.  They all claimed they don't slip, help wick sweat, and were of course stylish.  I spoke to the bondiband woman who said these actually worked.  She gave me the backstory of how bondibands came about.  I wanted to try one of them, but did not want to dish $15 for one band.  I wound up going with the bondiband which was only $8 for one band.  I found a cute one that is purple (my running outfit is purple) with pink dog paw prints.  I tried it on today while I was walking the dogs and mowing, and it did stay in place.  It'll be interesting to see how it works tomorrow.

So tomorrow.  Well, I will be getting up at a bright and early 4am and meeting with some running group members at 5:20am.  The race starts at 6:30am.  There are predictions of rain and storms.  Ugh!

This is technically my first half-marathon.  Though I do have a time in mind, it's not as important to me per se.  At least not this go around coming back from not running for over a year.  This race is more about camaraderie than anything else.  I've met some great people and wanted to share in the experience of running this race.  The majority of them really do not care that much about a time (a few do).  For them, it seems more about completing the race, and running a good race for themselves.  And this is what I want to feel too--just to run the race and feel good about it.  The time is only the icing on the cake truthfully.  (I also would like to remember this race as I don't seem to have much memory when I ran my marathons back in 2008 :-/)

I'll keep you all posted on how tomorrow goes.