OC Marathon

It was cold and gloomy and looked like rain but we still headed out early for the OC Marathon. Why???

The kids had been training for the Kids run. During PE at school, they were training and ran for a total of 25 miles . The kids run at the OC Marathon was 1.2 miles and would be their final leg in the 26.2 miles of the marathon. While the marathon and half marathon started at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, the kids run and the 5K were at the Irvine Spectrum, much closer to home.

Evelyn hurt her knee on Friday when her and Tom were ice skating. She still hobbled along with us to cheer on Greg. Greg found his buddies Gregory and David to run with. We also saw Gavin and coach Skinner from football and many other people we knew.




The boys decided to run at 9:00 with the 11 and 12 year olds. Their time was 9:30. Greg is to the left of the photo almost standing next to the man in the black sweat pants and sweat shirt.
Ronald McDonald was there to entertain and talk about the Ronald McDonald houses. The world record holder for the 100 m was also there. I forget his name, but he is from Jamaica and will be running in the 2008 Olympics. :) Here he is. And that is Greg just to the left of him.

The air horn blasted and the kids were off. Greg was at a full on sprint. I told him to pace himself. Oh well. He's up there near the front of the group and I know which shoe is his :)

Gregory was the first of the group to come in. Evelyn thinks he was about the 6th runner in. Greg was in the top 20.

After the kids finished the race, they each got a participation medal. More awards will be handed out at school. Greg was pretty winded but was fine in just a few minutes. He is already talking about doing more races. That's my boy!
I asked the kids what they wanted for breakfast and it was unanimous, Starbucks. We ended up driving north on Alton and this was the route of the marathon. We didn't see any runners this time. We went to the closest Starbucks I knew of and then headed back to Alton. We parked in a parking lot facing the street and sat in our warm cozy car with our Starbucks waiting for runners to go past us. We sat for almost 30 minutes and maybe saw 20 runners go past. Some looked exhausted while others looked like they just started running. At this point the runners had about 3 miles left of the race.

Greg and Evelyn are now talking about training to run 5k races. We have worked out a training schedule and just need for the rain to let up so we can get started.