MARATHON!

Yesterday Danny and I ran our 26.2 miles from Tilden Park to Lake Chabot.

I tried so hard to make that map a bigger jpeg but it kept turning out poopy and now I am too tired to write about our stupid race. So for now I will post pictures and try to come back and fill in the gaps later, when I'm less tired and not frustrated.

That was us at the start of the race.

And here's us at the end (slightly sweatier):

Here's a picture of Danny running through the early morning fog with my finger covering up half the frame. Sorry about that. But I was still getting the hang of the iphone. And I like this picture, because it really captures the mood.

And here's Danny on top of the world, with Diablo rising up over the fog bank we had just run through. This was the highest point of the race, but we had only done about 5% of the 5000 feet of total climbing we were going to do. That's because there's a whole lot of canyons in those east bay hills that we had to climb down and back out of, over and over and over again. The topography is like a crumpled up newspaper. And I'm only slightly exaggerating.

This is me, enjoying going down one of the canyons. I enjoyed coming up less.

This is my face, melting in the heat. It got hot by about halfway through. That is what happens when you take too long to run a marathon.

We took a long time, partly because Danny got stung by four hornets, or by the same hornet four times, I don't know which. I got stung by zero hornets. Danny took one for the team. Or two. He threw his body in front of angry hornets to save his wife, and now I know just how much he loves me. His ankle swelled up, though, and started throbbing with every step he took, which would probably slow anyone down. And of course, my insisting on him carrying me piggy back probably didn't help.

Just kidding. But aren't we cute? So I won't mention how long it took us, but I will say that it took us longer than this 81-year-old guy in the Twin Cities marathon the weekend before, who stopped to have a catheter put in and still finished faster than us. How embarrassing. But Danny said he probably had fewer hills to contend with. And fewer hornets.

But we finished strong and we stayed together, and that is what matters. This race was not unlike a good marriage, we decided. Sometimes it gets a little rocky but you have to stick it out together because that is what you signed up for and in the end you will not regret it.