Rock and Roll Marathon

Anthony has been training for the Rock and Roll Marathon since July.  He runs 5 days a week with his long runs on the weekends.  He would get up early to run, but we still missed having him around to be lazy and hang out with on the weekend mornings.  

Friday CeCe and I made him some peanut butter cheesecake brownies for an after race treat!  

The kids and I knew we wanted to see him during the race so I came up with 3 good (easy to get to) places to watch.  We watched at miles 11, 16 and 20.  It was perfect!!  Traffic and parking weren't bad at these places because we purposely avoided downtown until the finish line.  We left the house at 7:45 and made it mile 11 in plenty of time.  It was chilly out that early!!  

Next we hit Chik-fil-A on the way to Savannah State's campus to watch him at mile 16.  We were close to a band here and there were lots of people cheering.  The runners had spread out from each other enough that we could easily spot Anthony.  We took his sweatshirt from him and passed him his sunglasses.  It was warming up!  

Next stop was mile 20 which happened to be right in front of our church!  We hit a little traffic trying to get here, but made it just in time.  

The kids were excited to get high 5s from Daddy! 

 From the church I was a little nervous about getting into downtown (so many roads were closed and tons of people trying to get down there).  But it was easy peasy!  We lucked up on a great parking spot fairly close to the finish line.  I had told Anthony that we wouldn't try to see him at the finish line, I didn't think we'd get there in time.  We made it with 25 minutes to spare!  I had been getting text updates on my phone when he passed certain points so I had it figured out pretty close as to when he should finish.  I had the camera out, kids were on the fence watching and.....we missed him!!  He sped up a little at the finish (just like last year, maybe I'll know better next time!) and he came through about 1 minute before I really started watching.  GRRR!!  We waited and waited and I got worried something bad had happened to him but then I checked my phone and sure enough, he had finished 10 minutes earlier!  We were so glad to see him and hug him once we found him.  He finished 22 minutes quicker than his goal of 4 hours.  26.2 miles in 3:38!!  Crazy!!    

We found our friends the Tootles again and Bryce and Nick had fun running around playing. 

 We stayed for about 1.5 hours after he finished and then came home for the afternoon.  Other than a really weird gross looking toenail, he came through it without any injuries!  He just figured up that since his training began in July he has run 472 miles!  Bryce has his Rock and Roll one mile race tomorrow so check back for pictures from that!