(#14) OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon – Part 1 (A Huge, Incredible, Lovely Race)

May 5, 2012

This is the largest half marathon in the country. It appears on many lists of “best half marathons” and “best half marathons for first timers.” I’m pretty sure this is the standard by which all half marathons should be measured.

I knew this would be an excellent first race for my dad. It doesn’t get much better than this.

My dad thought it would be cute if we wore matching shirts (as did I). He wanted to wear the shirt he got for this race. (Of course, I had the same shirt, making that whole matching thing quite easy.)

These are super comfortable, cool looking shirts. “But, Daddy! Everyone will think we’re such newbs!” “I am a newb!” he answered. (From everything I’ve heard, wearing the shirt of the race you’re in is a big tell-tale sign that you’re newbie (unless it’s from a previous year).)

(One of my dad’s many great characteristics is his incredible ability to never care about what anybody thinks of him, so he was ready for us to go be total dorks in our new shirts.)

All right, I’ll jump on the newbie bandwagon. I’ll look super cool ’cause I’ll be with my dad, so who cares? (We look like we’re super cool kids, right?)

[wpvideo h8fALoGV]

We get to the race and line up in his corral, which is corral Z. I kid you not. The last corral. We couldn’t even see the start line from where we were. We couldn’t even see corral T from where we were!

Corral Z was a pretty hopping corral. It was basically all new people (plus a few supporters of new runners.) It was exciting to see everyone getting ready for their first race. We had a lot of laughs about being so far back. If you think I talk about making new friends, you should go somewhere with my dad. He makes more new friends than I do!

Beach balls were being hit from corral to corral. I yelled up for them to send one back to Z. Someone did, and it was dropped. Someone said, “Oh, corral Z.” We all laughed.

Once we heard a lot of clapping around 7:30, we figured that probably meant the race was starting. Slowly but surely we got to inch our way forward. Eventually, we got to turn onto the street where the start line actually was!

There were big video screens showing people crossing the start. When we got up there, I head someone say the Mayor of Indianapolis was in one of the cranes above us. Hey there, Greg Ballard, if you’re up there!

Not long into the course at all, we passed the Indianapolis Zoo, and you could see an elephant! Not only was there this big, cool elephant – there was a little baby elephant beside it. Awww.

My dad said it was a good thing I didn’t really have a sense of smell because I guess the zoo smelled like animals, or something.

Indy has huge signs when you’re coming up to a water stop. Brilliantly, they have blue ones when you’re coming up on water, and green when you’re coming up on Gatorade. Also, because it was a million degrees today, they had spray stations set up, or in some places people with hoses who would spray you. I walked through every single thing that was spraying water on that course.

I am already back in California while writing this. I actually have the OC half marathon tomorrow! I’m gonna head to bed and I will pick up here tomorrow.

2 thoughts on “(#14) OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon – Part 1 (A Huge, Incredible, Lovely Race)”

  1. Okay, you guys look too cute but you also look too hot! – long sleeve, black shirts…REALLY? THAT is what THEY passed out to all their runners? Seems like they wanted to set a record for number of runners transported to the hospital during a mini-marathon….your dad did say you saw a lot of ambulances so maybe that record was set 🙂 p.s. LOVE the videos!

    1. Well, they probably expected us to be too cool to actually wear that year’s shirt to the race. What are we – total newbs? 🙂

      The fabric was really light, though. The shirts definitely weren’t as hot as they look.

      I hydrated at every station, and ran through every source of spraying water. So, I felt great.

      I love the videos too. 🙂 Thanks!

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