Portland Marathon Oct. 4th

It took me a while to figure this new blog thing out or else I would have wrote sooner. Two weeks ago Scott, Kaitlin and I drove down to Oregon for the Portland Marathon. It is my latest step in my ambitous staircase life goal of running 50 marathons.

Luckily my brother Nate lives in Portland, so he was able to chauffer us around town getting registered Saturday night. We got to crash at his house that night, and since the rest of them didn't have to wake up super early, they stayed up watching The Office and others while I racked out.

I woke up a little before 5AM and my nice (or just insomniac) brother drove me downtown for some warmups around 5:30AM. My pre-race goal was to brake the 4 hour mark. This was an ambitious task, considering my only previous marathon I finished at the 4:30 mark.

A long story short, it ended up lightly sprinkling throughout about 65% of the race. You wouldn't think it would be a huge setback, and maybe it wasn't, but it definately through me outside of my "zone", as I typically volunteer to take the car instead of run to work when it's raining. All excuses aside, I finished at 4:23, a little ahead of my personal best but significantly slower than my goal. But hey, I figure these first couple ones I should consider just finishing my goal!

I should note that the three amigos (Kaitlin, Scott & Nate) spent the last couple of hours trying to track me down on the coarse. I actually did run into (no pun intended) Scott and Kaitlin chasing me down the sidewalk around mile 21. I was too tired to fake a smile, but I definately appreciated their support.

One fun part of the race was the Widmer Brewing Company building I past with about 3 miles to go. One not so fun part of the race was a couple blocks later when I drank what I thought was a cup of water, and finding out that it was actually beer.