The marathon...Pre-Race.

What an amazing day yesterday was. I'm going to give you some insight into the day and how it progressed.

Pre-Race
I was a little nervous the night before because of the time change so I called for a 4:30 wakeup call from the Hotel and set 3 alarms on my iphone. They had a little sign on the nightstand to tell us to remember that the clocks would go back an hour just after 2:00 AM. The one thing about that is...THEY SHOULD HAVE TOLD THE FRONT DESK PEOPLE ABOUT IT!!! My wake up call came at 3:30 AM!!!! I guess it's better than not calling at all but I had to sit around for an hour and a half before going to the Team Fox bus.

Took the Team Fox bus to Staten Island for the start. Nothing really eventful here. Took about an hour to get there and I was headed up to to the Orange section to be with my starting group.
First thing that I did was get some Dunkin Donuts coffee to facilitate getting lighter for the race if you know what I mean. Then about 2 hours before the start I ate my pre-race meal of two kashi waffles, peanut butter, banana and honey. It was all going smoothly at this point other than the getting lighter part. So, I walked around the area for a little bit and shazam!!! I was running for the port-o-john...

NOW I WAS READY TO RACE!! Well, only after going pee about 4 more times...I guess I was nervous.

NOW I WAS READY TO RACE!! I met up with Veronique from Team Fox. She was my running partner and we both run about the same pace. I've never run a marathon with someone but I knew that it was going to be beneficial to both of us. More on this later.

The race villages were full of people from all over the world. Tons of Europeans mostly dominated by the Italian contingency. Also a lot of runners from Japan and other parts of Asia. That's how you know how big this race is. I've run the Marine Corp and Pittsburgh marathons and it's a lot less international than NYC marathon.

At around 8:30, we headed up to the corrals as they were going to be closed at 9:05 and you would have to run with the 10:00 start time instead of the 9:40 start time if you weren't in there. As soon as the corrals were closed, there were a number of people that didn't make it...now this is the fun part...they all were now climbing over the 6 ft fence to make it in. Some were graceful...others not as much. All I could think about at this point was that these runners could have thrown all of the training out of the window by getting injured climbing the fences at the start. At about 9:15, the corrals were set and we all moved forward to the starting line.

I was getting nervous but also excited because I knew how hard I trained over the last 6 months and that with the NYC crowd, I would have a ton of adrenaline flowing through my body. I also knew that in under 4 hours, the world would know whether I beat Ryan's time or not.

With that...the national anthem began...the gun sounded ...and we were off!!!