This past weekend was the AFC (that’s America’s Finest City aka San Diego to those who aren’t in the know) half-marathon. Chuck and I went down on Friday evening with our friend Ellen to run it. We took Amtrak to avoid the icky doo-doo Friday traffic. And of course, cuz we’re kind of snooty that way, we booked Business Class seats. We had a bit of a white knuckle time getting to Union Station as all freeways to downtown L.A. were pretty much stopped dead, but in the end we made it there in time and spent the two hour plus trip enjoying wine, cheese and crackers, and various other goodies. Yum! We spent Saturday going to the AFC expo and exploring San Diego. We had dinner at the Harbor House restaurant, a very nice place with a very nice wine list. I mention this because I made the mistake of drinking two and a half glasses of said wine. Not the smartest thing to do the night before a half-marathon.
Race day dawned sort of – we had to catch a bus to the start at about 5:10am – and we sleepily wandered around trying to keep warm and stay awake. The race started at 7am and as usual we struggled to not get knocked down by the “I am so cool, I can run really fast for no good reason here at the start of this 13 MILE race” folks. We took the more sensible “all I want to do is finish the race upright” approach. And we succeeded, with Chuck coming acorss first in 2:24, and me 30 seconds behind feeelingg every drop of those two and half glasses of wine in my tired legs and sloshing stomach, and Ellen coming up about a minute later also suffering from the previous night’s mini-bacchanal. All in all though, a very satisfactory day! We’re still debating the optimal place to stay for this race: as it’s a point to point race (starts in one place, finishes in another), there’s pros and cons to all locations. We stayed at the Hilton this year which was near the host hotel, the Sheraton (because we started planning late and the Sheraton was full), and are thinking of trying to stay at the Sheraton next year and take advantage of all the free shuttles to and from start and finish. But there’s somthing to be said for staying downtown, and just using taxis and whatever shuttles we can finagle.