I see I’ve been terrible about keeping up my blogging – bad boy! Well, I decided to drop back and punt, picking things up with the San Antonio Rock and Roll Half-Marathon that we ran on 15 November!

First of all, I really enjoyed San Antonio and wished we’d had more time there. The River Walk area is like something the engineers at Disney would come up with (sorta reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean), and the town itself was very appealing to me. We saw the Alamo at night, which I think was a lot more interesting visually than it would have been during the day, although it was closed so we couldn’t check out the inside.

As for the half-marathon, well, that was an experience! First of all, outside of sitting in a stadium, I’ve never been in with that many people in my life: nearly 30,000 participants! We were staying in a Best Western near the freeway, and while we had the misfortune of being close to the railroad tracks in that part of town (honk-HOOOONNNNKKK! through the night), we were in a great spot to get to the shuttle buses to the start line, which we boarded at around 5:45 or so.

The bus dropped us off “near” the start line. I put that in quotes because we had to walk what seemed like half a mile to get to the start line, and then had to keep on walking to get to our “corral,” or designated start group. But that’s okay: everybody was in an upbeat mood, getting psyched for the race.

Then there were the porta-johns. Folks, one piece of advice if you ever want to participate in one of these things: do yourself a huge favor and bring along your own roll of toilet paper and some sanitary wipes in individual packets. I’ll wager that there were at least two hundred porta-johns around the start line area, and every single one of them was out of TP before the race started. And having to do your business without anything to clean your hands off with…well, you get the picture. One final note about porta-johns: make damn sure you lock the door. There were so many people lined up at these things, a new person would come to the head of one of the countless lines and check to see if a john was empty, only to discover that it wasn’t, but the occupant hadn’t locked the door! We saw a couple of hilarious incidents of this that morning – you’ve been warned!

The initial start of the race was a bit anticlimactic. I say “initial,” because with this many people you start in waves – that’s why everyone’s in a corral. It was probably a good forty-five minutes before our corral moved up to the start line, and then we were off! It didn’t take us long to realize that we were probably a lot further back than we technically should have been. You’re assigned to your corral based on your estimated pace time, and we’d put down 12:00, when we actually averaged closer to 11:15. But that’s okay – it was a great psychological boost to be passing a bunch of people! Besides, your real start and end times are marked by a little electronic tag you wear on your shoe, so when you cross the sensors at the start/finish lines, your time is recorded. Cool.

Now, this race is one of the “Rock and Roll Marathons,” which means – among other things – that they have a lot of local bands sprinkled along the course. This was pretty cool! However, we made the mistake of thinking there was going to be music along most of the way, so we left our iPhone headsets at home. That was a mistake: some of the bands were really good, but there were huge music-less gaps we had to run through. So, another note to would-be marathoners: always make sure you’ve got your music with you!

Another thing that was great was some of the signs the local folks put up. There were tons of people out cheering us on, which was great (thanks, San Antonio!). My favorite was this: “Beer all gone. Kenyans drank it…” Read the rest of this entry »

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