Retired, Unretired, Retired Again

 Oh gee, has it been 3 months since I last checked in here?  Oops, my bad!  Anyway, I think everyone knows my cousin & her hubby have been visiting with us from Kentucky.  Although my cousin & I have had a wonderful time catching up, there was one BIG surprise . . . we ran the local Ogden Marathon (half) last Saturday!

They were registered to run it for months.  It was part of the master plan.  Me? Nope, not on my radar at all.  I stopped racing several years ago because it was a lot of money to spend just for someone to hand you water during the race.  Besides I had a PR (personal record) for this race that I knew I couldn't even come close to so there was even less reason to ever run it.

The night before the race, about 7pm. I got a message from a friend who was registered to run it.  Unfortunately, she was injured and that was now money down the drain UNLESS she could find someone who was willing to buy her bib from her last minute.  So the next thing I knew I was setting the alarm for 3:30am to catch a bus to go to the top of the canyon with my relatives.

It was cold waiting for the race start.  I wasn't too uncomfortable because I was wearing Bob's old bathrobe over my warm-up clothes.  On my way to the start line I tossed it in a big donation box.

The official photos haven't come yet but Bob caught this about mile 10 or so.

I was pretty tired, OK, damn tired!  After all, I just ran 13 miles on Monday and no sane 61 year old does that then turns around and races another 13 miles on Saturday!  That's just stupid!  Oh, I mean that's just me ha! ha!  My PR for this race was 5 years ago and was 2:05:53.  So not doing things "right" cost me about 18 minutes.

Had I done a proper taper I could have likely trimmed a few minutes from my time but that's about all. That's OK, I'll take it.  Out of 31 runners in my age class I was #8.  I feel good about that.

OK, going back into retirement . . . 

NB