Aurora's Blog

This race wasn’t originally on my schedule. I had given myself two weeks off after those two heavy mileage weeks in row.

One weekend off from racing was kind of amazing. I skyped with the amazing David Petrick. (If you don’t know who he is, he’s one of my friends who I think is totally the bee’s knees. I caught up with some other friends as well. I slept, and did laundry. It was kind of glorious and strange. (Racing is completely glorious too, so I’m not trying to knock it at all.)

Don’t you hate it when people are all, “Oh my glamorous life. I’m just so busy that I relish the thought of doing laundry? Yeah, I know. I know that I choose to do half marathons, and that I’m not nearly as busy as tons of other people. I am thankful to be at least somewhat busy with things I love. But getting up early, traveling out to who knows where, and traversing 13.1 miles is sort of draining sometimes. And it was really nice to have a little break (a break that would get very old if had too often.)

After I had one restful weekend, I knew another one wasn’t necessary. And I found out about this race in Long Beach. Long Beach is super easy to get to – I get to take the subway straight there. And the race was only $30. I figured, why put off until later in the year what I could do this weekend? It was too late to register online, but they said I could register at the race.

I started a new job the week leading into the race. A day job. During the daytime hours. Of the day.

For the majority of this year, I worked nights and loved it. But I’ve been enjoying unemployment(/freedom) (let’s call it hiatus-ing) for a while now, and I didn’t want to pass up an awesome job at a great company (or any job at all, really). So, now I work when the sun is out.

That being the case, of course sleep escaped me (as it so often sounds like it does in this blog) for the majority of the week. (How can my body possibly get used to going to bed when the sun goes down?)

When my alarm rang for this half marathon, it seemed so easy to keep hitting the snooze. I hadn’t paid anything yet. It’s not too late to just sleep in. But, no. I need this.

I put on some Book of Mormon. It’s what gets me out of bed on many mornings, since I obviously have no choice but to dance. As I got dressed and thought about the day ahead of me, I realized I had somehow already forgotten how exciting it is to get up and do a half marathon. I pumped myself up, grabbed my hat and glasses, and went on my merry way.

Even taking the first bus of the morning to Long Beach, I didn’t get there until right at 6:30 – right when the race was supposed to start. The race started a few minutes late, so I could’ve hurried to join that group. But they had another wave starting at 7 to help break it up a little. I decided to wait, which was nice.

I had time to settle, stretch, meet a guy from Ohio. We found out they didn’t have mile markers on the course. He mentioned that it was okay, because he’d just use his phone app. Great idea. I hadn’t used mine in a while, since I hadn’t been going for speed lately. But I definitely wanted to be able to keep track of my distance, so I fired up my MapMyRun app.

And this is where I’ll pick up tomorrow when I actually, you know, talk about the race I set out to talk about.