Aurora's Blog

A night race! (I sang that line in my head. Please, sing it in yours as well.)

My first night half marathon. I was excited to sleep in… And I woke up at 7am. Couldn’t go back to sleep. So much for the benefits of an awesome night race.

I tried live tweeting for the first time with this race, which was incredibly fun for me! (My twitter is @AurorasBlog. If you scroll down to December 2, you can see the live tweeting in all its glory.)

I am generally a pretty late adopter of technology. I’m not huge into social media. Now that the rest of the world already got twitter, then moved on to Instagram, I am loving twitter! Absolutely loving it.

People on and off the race course were tweeting me, which was cool. I’m actually a big proponent of human interaction, and I think as a society we use technology too much. I don’t want to live tweet every race. However, every once in a while, I think it can be fun to use twitter to enhance my interactions with racers around me, and to make some of my twitter followers who aren’t there feel like they’re there in the moment!

I try not to say the same things in too many forums on the internet, ’cause I don’t want to bore any of my amazing super fans who follow me on a bunch of different platforms. (I’m not even close to perfect about it. There are definitely things posted in multiple places, but I try to change it up!) But, in case anyone reads this way after December 2, 2012, and it’s a chore to go that far back in my twitter timeline – let me give you the overview of the race.

Some couple got married and renewed their vows during this race. I saw a sign for a restaurant where you eat free if you’re over 350 pounds! (Sorry the name of the place isn’t on the sign, so I don’t remember the name and can’t tell you if you fit in that category.)

I would love to know how that works – and what kind of business plan that is. Apparently there’s also a liposuction lottery. Let’s grab a bunch of body builders, retrace the course ’til we find this restaurant, and go get the skinny on it!

The wind was insane that night. I almost lost my hat, but I protect it as best I can, and made it to the finish with my hat still on my head!

They gave me a special (extra) bib for this race to make me feel special since I’d run 10 of them. But the Rock ‘n’ Roll bibs are already the biggest ones. Where am I supposed to put a second one?! (I went with my leg.)

Overall, this race is great. There was one section around mile 8/9 where it got dark and quiet. We went through some random streets without any bands. (There was probably some kind of zoning thing preventing bands since we were just going around some houses and I think, a school.)

When I got to the finish, I tried to spy for a gold medal. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Series had a few gold medals hidden within the normal medals, and if you got a golden one, you won $1,000! Alas, there were no gold medals to be found.

I got my little post-half-marathon space blanket from one of the coolest, most fun-loving staff members I’d ever met. Get this! It turned out he’d had Wolff-Parkinson-White as well, and he also had to have open-heart surgery! Is it a small world, or what?

I’d spent so much time tweeting and talking open-heart surgery that I missed the heavy metal booth before they took it down. So, I don’t have my super huge Rock Idol medal yet (that’s pretty much the size of my face). But you will see it when I get it!

This was definitely a fun race, and one I’d do again.

Epiloge: The following day, I went to Tasti D-lite! That’s right. There’s a Tasti D-Lite in Vegas! If you are not familiar with Tasti D-lite, it is an amazing ice-cream like dessert. I am obsessed with it. It used to only exist in New York/New Jersey. It’s branching out, but it’s still not everywhere. However, they do have one just off the Vegas strip and I was ecstatic to go there.