Boston 2011: Thoughts as a spectator

So I had an absolute blast and a half spectating.  I loved screaming my guts out at everyone who passed - if you had your name on your shirt or some sort of interesting apparel, you were getting some ridiculous motivation from me - and watching the elite race (and explaining it to my non-runner friends) was really cool.

However....

I think spectating brought it home for me that drinking and screaming and watching are fun...but out there on the course? That's where I want to be.  I wasn't sad that I wasn't running this year since with my injury issues over the winter it would have been a train wreck anyway, it was just more of a yearning for the marathon and an epic explosion of excitement for Boston 2012.  Like, as soon as I got home from spectating, I wrote 4/16/2012 on a post it note and stuck it up on my desk.  Because THAT is the motivation for my next year of training. To be one of those people running through Brookline past a group of drunken screaming grad students at this time next year...and to be killing it. :) (Although after this year's 'once in a lifetime' weather, how much do you want to bet that next year its going to be 35 and pouring? Hmm?)

So we started out the morning at my apartment with a power hour to ensure that we were all sufficiently ready to cheer when it came time to go down to the course....5.5 beers in an hour will generally ensure that that happens. Hah! We were watching the race coverage on TV while we did this and everyone was commenting on Kim Smith taking it out like a crazy woman. "Why would you do that? I think I would want to stay in the pack" commented one of my friends, which honestly at the time I kind of agreed with, but she was looking so strong that I was interested to see what would happen by the time they were passing us (~mile 23)

We headed down to the course around 11 and staked out our spots - the crowd was pretty sparse at this point, but soon the elite women were coming through!  We were all confused looking around for Smith, at first I assumed that she had just dropped back but more and more runners kept coming at we never saw her...only later did we find out that she had a torn soleus and had to drop out.  Poor girl :( I was actually really rooting for her because I know she trains in Providence, so even though she isn't American she's kind of "local".

I took a lot of pictures of the elites...

Desiree Davila in the LEAD! I don't think I even processed while I was watching that this was an American woman.  I wish this picture was less blurry, because it is cool. 

Kara Goucher...none of my friends could believe that she had a baby 6 months ago.  I was so excited to watch her run!

Top 2 men - Mutai & Mosop - on their way to a course record/world best/whatever you want to call it with wind and asterisks and question marks...still a pretty epic time

Ryan Hall! Happy to see him having a solid day out there today.

The perils of marathon running.  Hey, I would be completely willing to poop myself if it meant I could run a 2:37 marathon (which this woman did)

My running buddy's husband Ryan, rocking the GBTC red!

After the elites my picture taking trailed off, because I was mostly focused on waving my sign and screaming at the top of my lungs.  I also realized yesterday that what Andrew said last year was completely correct, that it is almost impossible to pick out individual people out of the endless stream of runners unless a) they're wearing something really distinctive or b) they recognize YOU.  Out of all of the bloggers/DMers/teammates of mine running, I saw maybe 6 GBTCers and one DMer who runs for the BAA (although in retrospect, I think I noticed a couple others, I just didn't realize it at the time). 

All in all, a really fun day.  We all got quite sunburnt and were pretty much dead to the world by 7 pm...kind of like we would have been had we actually run the race...haha.

Yesterday I went for a delightful 7.75 miles, my longest in almost 2 weeks since trying to figure out this hip issue, and actually felt great.  I tried to keep the pace easy, ended up with 8 flat, which I suppose is acceptable, and I promise based on effort it truly did feel easy.  I'm hoping to get in a decent mileage week of easy running this week, and then see if I can head back to GBTC practice next week to at least complete part of the speed workout.  God knows if I'm going to be racing a 6K in a few weeks, I need to remember how to run fast...