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Hi Walkers! Diane, Nancy, Barbara and I left Friday afternoon and after a stop in Fillmore we got to Vegas just before dinner (FYI, there must be a finishing school in Fillmore because I'm pretty sure our waitress and diner mates were graduates. In one conversation about football they threw around words like "som' b***ch" and "ni**er quarterback" just like I always imaged the Queen might. Why swear like a sailor when you can aspire to swear like you're from Fillmore?). Diane saved us loads of money by introducing us to the surprisingly fresh and well-priced meals ($1.50 breakfasts!) at Wild Wild West where Nancy and I tried deep fried oreos (they taste like chocolate donuts). That wasn't what I meant by "fresh", but it was tasty. Walking through Vegas there was the usual sights: huge flashing TV screens, slot machines, and cleavage. There were some depressing points, like seeing the same guy at one betting screen the entire weekend. The elevators at the hotel required that we insert our keys and push the floor button such a particular way I figured it was a sobriety test or a sociological experiment since one man kept standing right in front of the buttons so no one else could reach them without looking like we were getting fresh. We went to the Las Vegas Marathon Expo on Saturday and browsed ourselves silly. I haven't been to any marathon expos before this, but it set the bar for having scads of free goodies. After getting through the well-organized registration desks, there was the expected area of LV marathon merchandise, which opened into a medium sized auditorium stuffed with booths. We got free issues of Her Sports, which is changing their name and format to Women's Running (subscriptions are $19.99 per year), samples of Lara bars, free coffee, mahatma rice samples, and pens and knick-knacks from other vendors. The clothing and shoe vendors that were there were Pearl Izumi, Race Ready, Crocs, Adventure Babe/Dude, booths for insoles, and tons of others. It took us a little over an hour to get through everything. When we were finished we ran around a rodeo expo in the next room. Boy, that was a completely different crowd—leather, leather, leather, million dollar luxury campers, and more leather. Everything started blurring together for me after fifteen minutes. The morning of the marathon, we woke up at 4am. Diane had given me Benadryl to help me sleep and apparently I was so out of it that I had been cuddling Nancy inadvertently (sorry, Nancy!). We walked a mile between hotels to get to the starting line and passed a few small groups stumbling in from the night before. Outside it was 40 degrees, no wind, and momentously unbeer-scented on the Strip. With 15,000 participants, I couldn't see a blank spot anywhere on the street. They started with cheers and spectacular fireworks and the next 5 or 6 miles went by pretty quickly since there was so much to see. It was amazing to think that the entire Strip was closed to traffic and that we could walk freely from Mandalay Bay, past the Wynn and the torn-down Frontier, and well into the old section of the Strip. The road was flat, though the road bumps that separated lanes, the divots in the pavement, and the very slight sloping on the edges of the road still required that we watch where we were going. The aid stations and port-a-pottys were well stationed, though the lines were annoyingly long in a number of places. The back part of the out-and-back course was not beautiful but it was motivating to see the Mandalay Bay sign so prominently a couple of miles from the end. During the course some highlights were: three women dressed as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Elvises, an Elvis with a hot pink cape and pink decorations all over his white pantsuit, the run-though wedding chapel, the lady who was nuts enough to run/clump in 5 inch Elvis wooden platform shoes, the Elvis with a radio strapped to his Camelbak that played "Viva Las Vegas", and a poor guy who had lost a bet and was running the marathon without any training and wearing a t-shirt that explained his predicament. The best part of the trip was the company, by far. They turned a well-organized, fun half marathon into a blast. I still would like to put in a vote that we dress up like Ann-Margaret or Pricilla Presley if we go again. Thanks for reading! cindy |
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