Short and Stupid: Half-Marathon Edition — Touched with Fire Media

1. I knew the course was going to be too long by the second mile. My GPS device was already registering mile markers well ahead of the course.

2. If I never run another race around a golf course — no matter how beautiful the surroundings — I’ll be fine. I don’t live in the Pacific Northwest so that I can spend all my time jogging through manicured stands of pine trees scattered between mowed lawns that happen to be close to some mountains.

3. I almost threw up at the end. I was worried some people who I’d passed several miles back were trying to run me down, so I attempted to sprint the last 200 meters. Then I thought I was going to die; then I noticed they weren’t back there; then it took everything in my power to keep from ejecting the little food I had in my stomach.

4. We did veer out of the golf course and run through Roslyn, WA, where the exteriors of Northern Exposure were shot. Northern Exposure was probably the first adult TV show I ever got into, when I was early in high school and the show was late in its run. I remember I used to flip back and forth between it and an MTV soap opera called Catwalk, which was about a band of some sort.

5. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that Neve Campbell may have got her first big break in Catwalk, so maybe I wasn’t being as silly as it sometimes seems in memory.

6. Here’s a picture of the medal, in case you’re a cynic:

I never know what to do with these things.

7. It was, far and away, the worse race I’ve ever run in. Worse, even, than the Crater Lake Rim Run, which was a marathon run at 7000 feet through the southern Cascades, which had a two-mile-long hill at the 22 mile mark. It probably didn’t help that my GPS was telling me that I was over half a mile past where I should have stopped. I was fantasizing about shouting at the person at the finish line who handed me the medal, but luckily for him I felt like I was going to barf and I didn’t think barfing on him was a proportional response.

8. Dumb Idea #1: Staying in a hotel 35 miles away from the finish line.

9. Dumb Idea #2: Not booking a second night at that hotel, so that I could lie around eating Ritz crackers all day, which is what I wanted to do.

10. Dumb Idea #3: Driving five hours to Bend that afternoon.

11. At least I got some fish & chips out of the deal.