Rock The Parkway

Yesterday was the Rock The Parkway 1/2 Marathon... our first halfsy of the Spring! This was the first year for this race. It started at Burns & McDonald at about 95th and Ward Parkway and then followed Ward Parkway until it looped through some Brookeside neighborhoods, along Loose Park, and then back up Ward Parkway to the finish. Lots of hills!!!

Brooke & I at the start:

Can you believe some guy was making fun of me for bringing a camera along for the race? I'd like to think we beat him to the finish. (He obviously didn't understand that I have a wildly popular blog with thousands of readers waiting anxiously for these pictures.) (I'm not delusional, you're delusional!)

The weather was gorgeous when we got to the race start. Brooke, warming up:

It quickly started to go downhill as we waited for the race to start. Me, being a dork:

It started to rain almost exactly when the race started. It alternated between a light sprinkle to a serious downpour throughout the race. At about mile 6 Brooke stepped into a huge puddle and completely soaked her foot. Because of all the rain, I didn't want to pull out my camera and risk water damage, so not many photos from the actual race. But I absolutely had to take this picture:

Those blurry feet are barefoot! Some guy ran the entire race without shoes!!! People are crazy.

Drew came out and stood in the rain to watch us. He saw us three times throughout the race, including at the end when we were coming into the finish:

Our official race time was 1:50:44... pretty good for a cold, rainy day! I took 33rd in my age group (out of 188) and 406th overall. The female winner ran in 1:18:12... something to work towards I guess! :)

For this being the first year of Rock the Parkway, I thought the race went really well. The miles were all marked clearly, there was plenty of water and Gatorade, and everything went really smoothly. I would prefer they provide better weather, but I guess I can't get everything. My only complaint was that as we were running into the finish, trying to finish strong, the runners who had already finished were walking the opposite direction on the course back to their cars, so we ended up having to dodge some folks. Not exactly what you want to do when you're at the end of 13 miles. Not a huge deal though. I hope they do a better job of blocking off the finish at the end next year. But I totally plan to do it again next year!