Photos from the Boilermaker

In the lobby of our hotel at 6am ready to split into two cars and head to the 15K and 5K starting lines!

Our 5K runners - Melissa, Kirsten, Mark, Justin and Morgan

The 5K runners nicknamed us 15K runners "The Crazy Ones" - Russ, me and Marathon Laura

Okay - so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Russ and I held back at the beginning waiting for that brutal hill to appear, but it seems our hills here in Lima are rougher than the one on the Boilermaker route in Utica. It reminded me of a story my Uncle Bob tells about running the Boston marathon. He was running up this hill towards the end of the race and said to the guy next to him "Is this heartbreak hill?" The guy answered back "Yep." My uncle said he knew right then and there, he'd made it, he'd conquered Boston. Once we could see the crest of the 4-mile hill, we knew the rest was going to be cake. We were lucky - it was a cool day, more like May than July. It was nice running weather. I'm sure if it'd been hot, it would've seemed a lot more difficult.

Russ and I hoped to finish in under an 11 minute mile. We ran the first few miles at our 11 min pace, saving some energy for "the hill." But once we figured out at mile 3.5-ish that the hill wasn't as bad as we'd expected, we pushed it and cut a lot off our average time to come in at 10:47 minutes per mile. We ran together the entire race and finished at exactly the same time - 1:40:16 - with a little sprint at the very end. We were very pleased with our time, but now wish we'd pushed it earlier on because the hill wasn't awful. I finished 8,931st out of 10,583 15K runners. And yes, it seemed like that many runners! It took us 7 minutes of walking once the race started to just get to the starting line. There was a lot of dodging around people and trying to squeeze through. I had shin splints for the first few miles because my stride was so funky running in a crowd.

Marathon Laura (who ran the 15K loads faster than us) and the 5K runners were all waiting for us at the end - Mark, Kirsten, Russ's wife and daughter (Melissa and Morgan), and Marathon Laura's husband Justin. By the time us slower 15K runners got to the party, the food was pretty well picked over, but there was beer available and Mark tells me the band was good. I was just so overwhelmed by the crowd that I didn't even notice Nik and the Nice Guys playing! I'm not sure I'd instigate going again, but the rest of the crowd wants to try it again next year, so I'll tag along.

A little note on Laura - Russ met her through the Lima Rotary. She raised money for Rotary International's global initiative of the eradication of Polio - all while running her first marathon in the beautiful city of Paris. Russ introduced her to me. He also has a sister Laura, so he started calling her Marathon Laura, so I'd know who he was talking about. He now calls her Laura from Leroy, but I think Marathon Laura is a much cooler (and well deserved) nickname!