This weekend was a busy one for us – we rented a cabin on the river near Leavenworth with Denise, Marcello, Domenic, and Cole so that we could run the Leavenworth Half Marathon. This particular race has a lot of meaning to me – my dad ran this as his first half marathon last year and I pushed him to do it again this year and a lot of our family and friends were going to join. Unfortunately this year was a bit tough for everyone – about a week ago, I tweaked my knee again playing soccer, reinjuring it where it was swollen and not holding up. My dad did something to his knee as well, making the last three weeks of training difficult. Denise was stuck in trial for seven of the ten weeks she should have been training. Scott caught a decently bad cold this weekend and with the wild fires burning, Kim would not have been able to breathe, let alone run. Mark’s schedule is too insane and my Uncle decided to hang up his hat with the running because he has been plagued with injuries as well.
So we were down to Denise, Marcello, my dad, Shirley and I in the race. As a game time decision, Denise, my dad, and I all decided to walk the half marathon – not worth the injury (and such a bummer as I had trained up to 8:30min/mile and would have set a PR). Marcello and Shirley were the only two who ran it. Shirley had also been battling knee injuries throughout her training. And Marcello’s plan was just not to train.
My dad loved what Denise and I did in Vancouver in May, where we took a photo with every mile marker, so we continued the tradition with him in this race. For every mile except the last few we had people around us to take our photo, which was great (and that crazy contraption around my dads head is his helmet cam and I am sure I will have video to link to for that that will be entertaining). Most of the race we all bantered back and forth, with all the folks around us enjoying it (or maybe not…).
The race was COLD. I think it was 27 or 28 out when we started and I didn’t have feeling in my hands until almost mile 8 or 9 and I don’t think Denise ever warmed up. The smoke was also crazy – you could feel the smoke as you were breathing and could see it settling against the mountains all around you.
We finished in around 3 hours and 20 minutes and Marcello ran all but the very beginning half mile where he walked with us and he finished in 2 hours, 8 minutes. When he called Denise and I, we had some choice words about how wrong that is before settling in on how proud we were of him for doing it and in a crazy good time.
All the photos below were taken with my Sony camera with no editing, I just pulled them together in a collage starting with the pre-race photos, moving through the mileage markers, to the end of the race. Enjoy!
