The Cleveland Marathon

What a weekend, I took off early from work Friday and we went to the Cleveland Expo with Charles and Tara. We went to the Great Laked Brewing company for lunch and guess what I had Dan, the pretzel crusted chicken, how funny, I also tested 3 beers and then ordered a pale ale but I still just like light beer. The expo was ok but smaller than the couple we've been to. We then had to rush home to get to the Road Runners meeting. We had 5 runners before the meeting, me, Dan H., Marsha, Janet and Michele,we did 4 miles then listened to Bart Yasso from Runners World talk about some of his adventures. It was a very interesting meeting and I talked to Bart about facebook and he remembered me and some of my posts, amazing since he has 2000 FB friends.
Saturday we spent the entire day resting,eating and drinking to get ready for Sundays marathon.
Today was the big day, we went to bed a little late but I did get a nap in the middle of the day to help,went to bed at 11:30 and awoke at 2:00 unable to get back to sleep, so we got up and got ready. Dan and Heather drove us and we arrived nice and early and parked in the Galleria parking garage which was about 65 heated degrees while it was 45 outside. A large group of Medina County Road Runners met at the FREE stamp and got our group picture. The weather was pretty nice for a marathon but I didn't really enjoy the course and the wind seemed to be always in our face or at our side, never at our back. It was also smaller than I expected, the 1/2 sold out at 4500 runners and the full had just less than 1300 runners. We went out like normal, just a little fast after the 1st mile and were ahead of Dans bq for quite some time, we crossed the 1/2 marathon line in just over 1:36, then around mile 18 I said goodbye to Dan as I was getting a little slower, then bye mile 20 I was getting my usual calf cramps and was slowing even more.
The last miles were tough but I still thought I could break into the 3:20's but I walked a bit and just couldn't hold a good pace for long. At almost 26 miles Pete Mycek passes me and yells but I could hardly move as the cramps had stopped me entirely right there so close to the finish but I was able to take off one last time and cross the finish line somewhat strong at 3:31:49 but the official time on the Cleveland site was 3:30:45. Dan finished 10 minutes in front of me with a great new PR of 3:21:46. I could go on and on with all that went on and all the people that were there but I'll cut it short, Marsha was unable to run because of the high blood pressure problem we just found out about this week, Charles couldn't run due to IT problems and Joe H. may have a fractured bone in his foot that caused him to finish his race at the half way point still with a great time of around 1:37 I think. I hope everyone gets over all these injuries really quick.