Rock and Roll!!

Okay, most of my blog is dedicated to my adorable children but Kevin had a pretty monumental event on Saturday that deserves to be recognized...he ran his 1st (and as he says, his last) marathon! We have been planning on running the Rock and Roll Marathon in Seattle since Febuary this year. Kevin's reasons come from a long standing agreement between us that he needs to complete a marathon in under 6 hours if he ever wants to be able to buy a motorcycle. This was mostly me not wanting him to ever have one but lo and behold, he finished wtih 9 minutes to spare. So Kevin, me and my brother-in-law, Nate, ran it together on Saturday. There was about 40,000 participants between the half and full marathon...thats a lot of people! Our race day started out pretty rough, our "continental breakfast" we were expecting was stale cheese puffs and a coffee machine. Luckily Nate had some extra nutra-grain bars we stole. The shuttle to the starting line was a gigantic mob of people shoving and yelling at each other, we pretty much had to body surf our way onto a bus. It seriously reminded of war of the worlds and one working car. It was insane.

The day before the race there was a huge expo downtown, we even had our fortunes read by the Brooks shoe genie. We got lots of free samples, our gaits analyzed, and met lots of very different people.At mile 8 during the race my ipod decided to quit working and my earring fell out while I was pulling out my earphones. I didnt stop for fear of being trampled. I had to run the rest of the race in silence...but luckily being the Rock and Roll Marathon, there were bands every mile and lots of random high school cheerleading squads yelling for us. I have never felt more loved. Kevin had a good race as well and said he felt the best the first half. There was quite a few hills on this course and lots of out and backs which were mentally very tiring.

One of my favorite parts of doing races like this is all the fun people you get to meet. Along the way I met a man dressed up in a polar bear suit, "running against extinction", several people in tutus, elvis costumes, and several other random things. I loved how many dads I saw with jogging strollers and baby carriers with "go mom!" signs. No doubt many of theses babies have been dragged along in the stroller on numerous training runs. I also saw a communal vaseline station which was rather gross. Overall, it was a fun course although I think next time I would just do the half as that was the most scenic and had the most spectators cheering.

Kevin eating his bagel banana sandwich. I am pretty darn proud of him for running it and finishing. That takes some effort! I am never get him to run with me again but he did it once!
Below are some state of the art pictures of us running, I know, we look awesome.

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