Here’s a video that I had the chance to be a part of creating last year and thought it’d be good to repost during the week leading up to Easter.  Hope you enjoy!

Had a great time with the family tonight.  Movie (RIO) and then this stack of food at Cook Out.  Good stuff!

If you look real close, you can see me...

It’s funny how we can be so close to something so big, and never know about it.  Kind of like living with a big ‘ol buffalo in your den and waking up one day and realizing it’s been there the last 5 years or so.  That’s a little how I felt when I heard about the Bridge Run down in Charleston, SC.  Granted, I’ve only been running a little over 3 years, but I was still surprised that I’d never even known about a 10k that has been run annually since 1978 and which now attracts more than 30,000 runners each year, and this year was no exception.  A record 40,000+ registered, and just under 35,000 showed up and ran, so I felt like I had a good shot at finishing in the top 10…thousand.

Just to give some comparison to the numbers, here’s what some other famous races draw:

• Boston Marathon: around 25,000
• New York Marathon: around 45,000

The number of runners was about 2.5 times the population of my hometown and a little over half the size of my entire county.  From what I understand, previous years the gun has sounded and everyone just took off, so with the growing crowds they decided to use a wave start this year and we were herded into corrals based on our expected finish time.  I registered in the 49:00-60:00 minute finishers, and apparently so did about 33,000 other folks, so I ran in a crowd the entire race.  That part of the experience was pretty frustrating, because I had really hoped to go sub 50:00, which meant an average pace of around 8:00/mile, but I knew right away that it would be very difficult when I ended the weaving in and out of mile 1 in 8:21.  Still, I was hopeful that the crowd might thin after that first mile. Ummm, no.   Continue reading