Bridge 2 Bridge!!!

I never look up race info until the night before (no reason other than generic brokenness), so I completely misremembered everything since doing this event two years ago. I thought it started on the eastside near where I work, but it actually starts downtown near the Morrison Bridge (it’s the Race for the Roses that starts near my work). And the first steep uphill isn't at Kerby, it's at Albina, so I was walking sooner than I expected. In fact, I stopped to walk during three stretches of steep uphill, plus stopped once on the Broadway Bridge and twice on the Fremont Bridge to take pics with my camera phone (hence the blurriness).


The one thing I did remember was the huge mental struggle during that last stretch along Naito Parkway to the finish line – I was sooooo ready to be done (the Portland Marathon ends on this same stretch, so it’ll be that same struggle times 20 if we run it).

Still managed to finish in less than an hour (59:18, or 9.33 minute pace). My sweetie and his son, plus mum and dad were there too to cheer me across the line (my kids are apathetic now about going to every event, so they slept in). Afterwards, my parents picked up my kids and we head down to the much-reviled, but still delicious Elmers, so I could have my usual "Belgian waffles ‘n bacon" post-race breakfast. (I'll update w/pics of breakfast when I get them...)

Woke up this morning and felt fine, no issues. Woooooo! Now looking at the same thing for next month with the Race for the Roses 5K and Cinco de Mayo 10K.

Oh, and my sweetie (gently) reminded me that I’m supposed to be finding a half-marathon on the coast. It’s proving difficult. There’s a few marathons and some 30k’s, and a whole slew of 5/10k’s, but nothing in that 13-mile range in that mid-summer time frame I’m looking at.

Sigh.

I might have to fall back on the closest thing, the nefarious Tillamook Bay Run, a 5 and 10 mile event that I was supposed to run in 2004, but was instead the day the gods decided to punish me for a laundry list of stupid offenses, thankfully all which have since been identified and dealt with. A tiny part of me wants to avoid it like the plague, but most of me wants to exercise the demons with a weekend with my baby at the coast and delicious post-race shakes at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Mmmmm… Coffee Almond Fudge.