As soon as I got through Uwharrie, Boston began to loom on the horizon, so I forced myself through recovery (involves a lot of the inner football coach saying, "you are NOT tired - KEEP RUNNING! You can slow down if you MUST, but KEEP RUNNING!") and began ramping up to the gold standard 20+ mile runs again. From the second I registered, I had been waffling about whether to TRY at Boston or not... On the one hand, I wanted to justify my place there, but on the other, I didn't want to hate the whole experience and miss out on things like kissing the Wellesley girls and high-fiving 800 little kids. It was pretty much going to come down to a game day decision, but I figured I should probably try to train for the former possibility because it certainly couldn't hurt the latter.
It turns out TRY was the operative word in "try to train" above. While I got all my long runs in, no problem, the track workouts were lacking due to a particularly insidious combination of work commitments, social commitments, and obnoxious weather in the 2 mos leading up to the race. That, coupled with an absolutely horrendous sleep schedule the week prior pointed me to the "enjoy the experience" side of things.
SO we arrived in Boston the day before the race, realizing, of course, that we had forgotten the little cards that said "if you don't have this with you, you can't pick up your packet". We suspected this was not actually the case, and that they were just trying to gently encourage people to remember them, but we were still a little apprehensive as we lined up to get into packet pickup. Fortunately, our suspicions were right and the nice lady in the 'problems' booth printed us new ones. We then picked up our packets and headed to the expo to try out all the next big things. Here are my reviews:
Pom blueberry juice - awesome
Power bar nuggets - awesome
Weird pink Gatorade recovery beverage - decent
Cherry extract drink - wow. that sure does taste like cherry... really... a lot
Fage Yogurt - yup - tastes like yogurt.. thank you!
Weird fruity herby water - surprisingly awesome... though it made me have to pee REALLLY bad
Anything given away at the GNC booth - DUDE - people really drink/eat this stuff???? That's just crazy.
Then we proceeded to Acton, MA, where Shawn's family awaited us so we could go candle pin bowling. It turns out I'm even worse at candle pin bowling than I am at regular bowling. ...unless I go two-hands-between-the-legs-granny-style, in which case, I rule! If there had just been 3 more frames, I'm pretty sure I would have caught and passed Ronnie, who was trying to emulate the pros and becoming progressively worse.
Our final pre-marathon stop was Shawn's brother's house, where we ate dinner, rummaged through our freebie bags, and found proofreading errors in the official Boston Marathon Race guide before going to bed where a giant black cat stationed herself just above my head to stare at me for the better part of the night.
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