4th Annual Mackinaw Memorial Bridge Race

Last weekend was a blast! J *finally* got to run over the Mackinaw Bridge, and we actually had time to relax and enjoy ourselves.

As usual, we did little to nothing to train for this event. J stuck with me for the first mile and when we got to the first mile marker and his watch read 11 mins, he freaked and took off. I forgot to put gum in my mouth so I was unhappy to have a dry/pasty mouth.

The online results don't give a pace, since the actual mileage of the run is semi up-in-the-air J and I choose to go with a guy we overheard saying his wrist GPS read 5.08 miles. Sounds good to me. The paperwork we received from the event coordinator says "The course is approximately 5.4 miles from start to finish." That would bump my pace up from a 11.23 for 5.08 miles to 10.43 for 5.4 miles. I'm not sure I was doing a 10.43 pace, since my first mile was closer to 11.23 by J's watch. I guess we will never know for sure!

We stayed at a hotel which is located at the base of the Mackinaw Bridge, Mackinaw City side. That was nice because we were able to walk around downtown instead of trying to find a parking spot. A couple of things could have been a little nicer though - the pool was across the parking lot and Mackinaw City in May isn't exactly steaming hot. Also there was some sort of water leak (I'm thinking since we were near the elevator, we had an ice machine right above us), so we had to keep the bathroom door closed to quite the noise. Also, no Food TV channel! Other than that, we were very happy with our accomodations.

Here are some of the pictures we took:

This is us (duh!) before the start of the race. It was around 6:00am and the sun had just started to come up. The weather was in the high 40's, but we were so excited to be there that we didn't care!

This is me being goofy before J took off ahead of me. I ran up ahead a bit and then turned around and was running backwards to the best of my ability. I remember asking him (jokingly) "I'm not going to run into anyone, am I?"

Here we are after the race at the ice arena after breakfast. We didn't stay for the results, because . . . we just aren't that fast. I did sprint past two gals at the finish who were in my age group, so I feel pretty good about that!