Reflections on a marathon

This past weekend was the Richmond Sun Trust Marathon. My son-in-law decided to run this year and we decided to go up and be his cheering section. The fact that our grand-daughter was going to be there added to our reasons to go.

Adam has run two marathons before: The Marine Corps Marathon and the NYC Marathon in 2008 (see my post about the 2008 NYC Marathon). This was my first. Since I didn't want to show him up, I elected not to run this year, maybe next year. Then again, maybe pigs will fly next year too.

Since I've been traveling a lot, my wife and I made use of frequent flyer points and hotel reservation points to minimize our cost. We flew up on Thursday and arrived late that night. Friday, we rode through the marathon route. That gave us non-runners a good view of what Adam would be seeing on Saturday and helped get him in the right mind-set. It also showed us all where the hills would be.

On race day, we saw the start of the race. Over 4900 runners started out. I made the mistake of being on the wrong side of the street and didn't get good pictures at this point. I also couldn't get back across the street until after all 4900+ runners passed.


After the start, we hustled over to the first check-point to cheer our runner on. He was looking good and flashed us a thumbs-up.

And of course, the smallest cheer leader even had her own sign:

I'm still processing pictures for uploading. All-in-all, we had a great time. Adam didn't finish in as good a time as he wanted, not sure how his time compares to the previous two. I guess next year I'll have to enter so I can show him how it's done (HA!).