May 29, 2003

I decided to stay at Aggie's tonight instead of at home.  This way I will be at least a half hour closer to the airport and I will be able to postpone the airport transportation decision for a little longer.  I got home from work and ran around like a nut trying to pack everything before The Amazing Race came on.   (What an awesome show!  I love the new season already!!)

May 30, 2003

We flew America West from Philadelphia to Phoenix as our first leg.  It wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be leaving that early in the day.  We got to watch Chicago on the plane which was good because it helped me kill some of the time but I have to say that I HATED the movie.   I even love musicals and I hated it.  I have no idea why they all had Oscar nominations.  But that's neither here nor there. Back to the trip report.

We landed in Phoenix and it was like a giant TNT convention. Everywhere you looked there were people in TNT gear.  Zillions of them were headed to San Diego for the marathon, of course, but there were a lot of cyclists too who were on route to their event. I'm going to have to look that up when I get home and find out what it is they were doing.  [I think it was the Lake Tahoe Century Ride]  It was neat, and it made me feel good to be part of the same club as all those healthy looking, cool people.

I was pretty tired and zombie like by now and I was happy to finally board the plane for SD.  I was in the last row, wedged into a middle seat next to a chatterbox lady (a very nice chatterbox, but enough already!) and it was a very long hour in the air.  [I talked to the chatterbox on Monday in the hotel gift shop. She did well in the 1/2 and was happy with her time but complained that it took 2.5 hours to get from the end of the 1/2 to the marathon finish by bus!] But finally, at 11:45 pacific time I was finally in San Diego! YAY!  But unfortunately, it was gray and cloudy, just like home.  (Never fear though, by 2:00 the sky was blue and the sun was shining.)

Getting our bags and finding the TNT shuttle to the airport was a snap.  I give a big round of applause to the organizers because it was painless to get to the hotel and I thought that would be the worst part of the whole experience.  Check in at the hotel was smooth too --- a pretty small line, quick check-in, and I was in my bed, reading the Welcome Packet by 12:30.

Aggie's plane was delayed so she wasn't going to land in SD until about 2.  That gave me just enough time for a short nap and a shower before she got to the hotel.  She was a good sport and decided to forgo a nap and shower herself so we could head right over to the Expo.

EXPO

Our hotel, the Holiday Inn on the Bay is kind of wacky looking. It's painted bright blue and orange. However, it is in a good spot overlooking the bay (duh!) and it seems quite close to the expo.  TNT was running a shuttle over there that is on 12 minute loop between the convention center and the hotel.  Again I give a thumbs up to the organizers who posted tons of schedules and signs to make it really easy to figure out where to go.

We took the shuttle to the expo and were shocked to find it nearly empty.   We didn't even have to wait in line to pick up our numbers or anything.  What a contrast between this and that horrible trip to pick up my number for Broad Street!  We got our numbers, chips, t-shirts (great looking - there's a picture near the bottom of the page!) and goodie bags in about 10 minutes.  Now we were able to do what we were really here to do:  Get more free stuff!

Boy was there lots of it!  Free snacks of all sorts, the best of the lot, by far, was something called a Detour bar.  Its some kind of high protein candy bar.  It tasted exactly like a Snickers bar only it has like 30 grams of protein in it.  There was some similar product called a U-Turn bar that was some kind of carmel thing.  Also very yummy. They sell them at Target so quick run out and get some!

What else was there?  Tons of Rock'N'Roll stuff.  I got a magnet, a pin and a very cool travel/gym bag.  Frivolous but still nifty. There were a million booths and we got lots of free bars and tastes of gels and clif bars and stuff. We also got some of the new flavor power bars: rasberry cream (with stripes), cappuccino and cookies and cream. I haven't had time to try them yet. I also entered about a million contests to win race entries and I also picked up a new TNT t-shirt and a pair of those TNT coolmax socks I've wanted to buy forever.  They even had a Starbucks booth that gave us free samples of Tazoberry ices.  YUM!

What else did we get for free? hmmm.....A bunch of Tylenol 8-hour packets, a road runner sports calendar, coupons for dole fruit/gel bowls, aquaphor tube, some basis face foamy wash, and these 2 big tubes of stuff called JogMate which is some new protein rich goo that's supposed to be rapid replenishment for post race recovery.  The lady said if we ate it after the marathon wed be very happy on Monday.  Well see!  [Well, I did feel much better after this race than Bermuda -- was it the JogMate?  Who knows, but I can't discount it.  It's Wednesday now and I feel completely normal -- even on steps!]

There was also tons of stuff for sale: clothes and shoes and running gadets.  There were also a bunch of Marines with a giant inflatable drill sargent balloon. They were trying to get people to hang off a pullup bar to win prizes.  I'm way to weak to try that, even for a freebie.  We skipped right over all the Suzuki stuff because we don't care about motocycles or outboard motors but if you're into that, I bet you would have loved it.

Aggie won a free ticket to an IMAX movie by answering a trivial pursuit question at the science center booth.  She got "what is the oldest animal in captivity" (giant tortise).  I got a hard question "what is the hub of the earth according to the flat earth society?"  Who knows? [The North Pole]

My favorite thing, without a doubt, was in a mysterious white box included in the goodie bag.  Inside the box was a little figurine, about 4 inches high, of that wild-haired, hawaiian shirt wearing, guitar wielding rock'nr'oll marathon guy.  He's not a bobble-head, exactly.  More of a bobble body. He's playing a guitar and he wiggles all over the place like Elvis.  I totally love it!  I can't wait to put his picture on this site. [See him on stage at the bottom of the page] He's almost better than the medals.  Oh! We saw the medals too! They're totally cool and we also caught a glimpse of the 39.3 thing in person.  Its HUGE and silly.  The guy at the table called it the Mr. T medal! [We had some discussion after the marathon about seeing the medals ahead of time.  It was neat to see them at the expo but we both kind of missed the element of surprise at the end.  There's a picture of the medal at the end of this page.]

We're back from the expo and dinner by now, and were getting ready for bed.  There were just a bunch of fireworks outside we think that they were maybe from Sea World but we're not sure.  Anyway, we're super tired and are planning to sleep all day tomorrow until we have to go to the top secret Alumni party and then to the pasta party.

This trip is awesome already!

May 31, 2003

We had a pretty good night's sleep. We were able to sleep until 7am (yeah, that's early but we went to bed at 10) and the night was marred only by an annoying train honking up a storm in the middle of the night.  Since we were free as birds until 3:30 when I had to go to the Alumni party, we decided to take our time getting ready before heading out to explore.

I brewed some coffee while Aggie took a shower and all was well for awhile.  I got into the shower and the first snafu of the trip happened.  I'm all covered in shampoo & soap when I hear a big knock on the door and Aggie talking to somebody.  I figured she was shooing away the maid but it turns out that she was really talking to a maintenance guy.  Soon, she was pounding on the bathroom door and asking if I could see water on the floor.  It seems the people in the room below us were having a giant flood and the maintenance guy needed to come into our room and do some repairs.  (If you read about my Bermuda trip, you know we had a brown water plumbing problem there.  Seems plumbing issues are going to be a theme with my marathons!) The fix-it man was nice and we were about to head out anyway so this was a pretty minor glitch in the day. [Update: a different maintenance guy came by on Sunday after the marathon to poke around in the tub some more.  They couldn't figure out what was wrong and the person below us kept complaining, so we were afraid to take showers after that!]

We explored the hotel grounds and finally found a little breakfast place where we ran into Karen (coach), Pat (TNT walker & friend from Bermuda marathon) and Tina (TNT rookie) getting some breakfast too.  We chatted and had bagel & egg sandwiches and made some plans about meeting up to go to the different scheduled events of the day.  Part of breakfast was spent talking about the goofy 39.3 monster medal which Pat & Tina had spotted at the expo. They were thinking of signing up for that race just to get their hands on that giant thing.  We had to confess that we were already registered primarily to get that medal!  [Breakfast at this hotel deli was somewhat of an ordeal for the whole trip thanks to the strange and incompetant man who worked the counter.  He was very easily confused, and perhaps hard of hearing, and he seemed to get every order at least partially wrong.  I ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel and he thought I ordered bacon, onions and cream cheese on a bagel.  Thank god he checked with me first!  I clarified my order but still didn't get any bacon.]

Aggie and I headed off to the expo again to see if we could get some more of the new flavor Power Bars (We were trying to collect all 3 new flavors and didn't have them all at this point.)  A good omen for the day: they were playing Copacabana when we got there!

The expo was way more crowded today so it really wasn't that fun.  We also went over to see if we could get some more of the JogMate stuff.  Its supposed to cure you of sore muscles if you eat a tube of this goo within a half hour of finishing a hard workout.  We had gotten 2 sample tubes yesterday but we wanted to get more for Pat & Tina who had missed out on that particular freebie.  Sadly, we didn't get more so we wound up giving them our spare tubes.

Oooh! The fireworks have started outside again!

I also found the display for the Inspiration to Perspiration book. It's a motivational book written by a TNT participant that uses Team In Training as a metaphor & plan for how to succeed in life.  When we approached the table a guy walked up next to me and started chatting about how great the book was and telling me all about it. Then he introduced me to a guy named Barry who is featured in the book.  Barry's daughter died of Hodgkins disease (I think) at age 19 just a few years ago.  Since then hes raised over $50,000 for the LLS via TNT.  The book includes his story and his daughter's 10 life lessons. [I saw Barry a few times during the actual marathon -- he carries a purple and green jumprope with him and was jumping along every so often.  I saw him at the start -- around mile 5 and again going down the finishing chute about a half hour after my finish.  He looked as bright & cheerful at the end as he did at the beginning.]  So anyway, of course I buy the book and then the guy talking to me grabs a pen and signs it.  Turns out, he's the author, David Jacobson.  Barry signed it too.  That was neat.  Click on the title of the book to learn more about the book & his plan.  His website is neat, I havne't poked around there a lot, but so far it looks good.

We also stopped by the TNT store to see if I could get another t-shirt since I realized the one I had was a real bargain.  just $8 for a long sleeved t-shirt.  They were all sold out though:  a bargain too good to last!  Lesson learned: always go to the expo on the first day!

We finally left the expo and decided to explore the "historic Gaslamp district".  What a total snoozefest!  Well, if you were looking for a place to eat, it was probably great, since there are about 4 million restaurants there. But thats it. Places to eat, cigar stores and crazy looking (probably homeless) men with beards.  Not a fun place to visit mid-day.

Then we decided to explore the trolley system and head to Old Town. Instead we decided to walk to the Seaport Village (a big touristy outdoor mall) to see if I could find a cool christmas ornament from San Diego.  I found a great one a palm tree with cool presents. I love it!

Alumni Reception / Pasta Party

Pat and I headed to the almuni thing and we were fretting a bit that we didn't have the special "purple ticket" that was mentioned in our travel packet. We were wearing purple transportation wristbands and we decided that that must be the ticket they were talking about. 

We met a nice lady on the bus who did have a real ticket and she showed us how to get to the reception area.  Luckily, on our way in we found a staff woman from Eastern PA there who had 2 alumni tickets with her.  Whew!  We would have been totally bummed out if we couldn't go because we were both really looking forward to getting our free alumni goodies that they promised us when we signed up. [I bet we could have gotten them even without a ticket since they had our name on a big list of alumni.]

What great goodies they were indeed!  We got a snazzy purple & black Nike backpack, a Powerbar hat, Rudy Project sunglass strings and a powerbar item. I got a double caffeine tangerine gel (another good omen from Bermuda) and we also got really nice t-shirts. Check out the picture! The shirt is blue -- I don't know if you can tell from the shot I have. 

The reception was really nice too.  We heard from the head of the LLS, the head fundraising guy and the founder of Team In Training,  Bruce Cleland. Then they presented special awards to all the amazing alumni people who have done between 10 and 32 TNT events.  People who have raised huge amounts of money (some over $100,000) and Bruce himself who has raised over a million all on his own, were also rewarded.  Fascinating!  I was particularly impressed by one guy, in a wheelchair, who had done more than 10 events and had also raised somewhere over $10,000. 

Since 1988 TNT has had 190,000 participants who have raised over $430 million dollars for LLS.  The participants have logged over 100 million training miles and have lost a collective 1,700 tons of excess weight.  Meanwhile, they've enabled researchers to improve the cure rate for blood related cancers by leaps and bounds.  It's really remarkable when you hear the stories of how they've made such incredible advancements in science and how people like me have really helped to save peoples lives. 

It sounds crazy that this thing I've done for purely selfish reasons makes a difference to a lot of people.  In the last year I've managed to raise about $8000 and I find that totally shocking!  

One of the speakers made a comment about how people always think that one person, or one volunteer can't really make a difference and then they pointed to Bruce Cleland.  Because of his crazy idea to convince his out of shape friends to do the New York Marathon 15 years ago 190,000 people did marathons and raised over $400 million dollars.  If he hadn't acted on his idea, think how many patients lives (and athletes lives) would have been different.  It was a great reception, all around, (did I mention the food? great salsa!)  and it really brought home what a special thing it is that were doing.

The pasta party started immediately after this and what can I say about it?  The food was good, the hall was enormous and the speakers were entertaining.  We heard more from Bruce about how/why he started TNT. Bruce has a daughter who was diagnosed with Leukemia at age 2.  He was an active volunteer for the Leukemia Society for years before deciding he need to do something different than just pestering his friends to raise money for the cause.  He came up with the idea to talk his friends into training for and running the New York Marathon for charity.  He successfully recruited 38 people, they all finished the marathon and along the way tey raised $340,000. Team in Training was born. Bruce's daughter is a senior in high school now and was in fact, at the Prom while we were at the pasta party.

They kind of retired his number as best they could at the Pasta Party. They gave him a purple TNT dri-fit shirt with a giant #1 on the back.  Pretty cool!

The Penguin made us all laugh, somebody won a motorcycle and a little kid & Leukemia survivor sang a couple of odd songs. One from Pippin and Sweet Caroline.  They told us that there were 3900 people doing the race for TNT here in San Diego and that they had raised 12 million dollars. 

They also were selling raffle tickets for this special painting buy a guy named Yuroz.  They said it was worth $60,000.  Anyway, they pretty much shamed us all into buying tickets telling us how much money they'd raise for charity if we all just spent the $5 for a ticket. (Something like $35,000 in 2 minutes).  Then he says. "if there are people are your table who are not buying tickets right now, stare at them until they buy one." It was funny, and effective! I'll cry if I win the picture, because it's really quite ugly.  Maybe I can sell it to raise money for future marathons! 

There was a hilarious guy directing traffic outside the pasta party.  He looked just like Captain Stubing (well, his outfit did anyway) and he was blowing a silver whistle and being just about as bossy as possible. He was hilarious!  Later, we found out that his name was Skip.

We're back in the room now and I did the appropriate alterations on my singlet (pinning back the underarm wings), I pinned on my number and I'm about to load the Camelbak. Then it's time for bed and waiting for the alarm to go off tomorrow at 3:45 am.  YUCK!

June 1, 2003 - The Marathon!

Yay! We both finished and did great!!

Aggie did her standard sub-5 and I did mine in a shocking sub-6.  To paraphrase the back of our medals:  "We Rocked!"

6:45 AM:  The race begins!  We were so far away, in corral 20, that we couldn't actually tell!  But there was a buzz in the crowd and there were big TV helicoptors hovering all around and it felt exciting anyway.

I didn't actually cross the start line until about 12 minutes later.  I was walking with Karen who paced me out of the gate and got my legs warmed up quickly. She had asked me what my goal was and I told her I'd be happy with anything under 6:30 but that I was wearing a 6 hour page band because in an ideal world I'd like to finish in under 6. 

She left me around mile 3.5 and since I was already walking faster than the 6 hour pace, I got a big head and decided that I would try to run some of the race.  I did some running over the next 5 or 6 miles. Not very much running, mind you, just enough to get me to 10 minutes ahead of the pace band and to have my left knee achy enough to know that any more running was strictly out of the question. I have since self-diagnosed my problem as ITBS. I'm going to try to start working on the stretches that help that so it won't hinder my run/walk program for Virginia Beach.

There were bands & loud music & cheerleaders along the course as advertised but there were definitely some gloomy stretches with no music.  One such area, along a freeway entrance, was so bad that a guy tried to lead the racers in a rousing rendition of B-I-N-G-O.  He had very few takers to singing with him though, so he gave up quickly. 

I can't keep up the timeline idea because I was using my stopwatch and don't really have any idea what the actual time was during anything that happened in the race until about mile 22 when somebody asked me for the time so I had to look. It was noon.

I knew right away that it was going to be a good day.  I don't know why, but I could tell in the first mile that my legs were going to be fine. I didn't have any pesky shoe issues, no stiff calves, no sock lumps. I think Aggie's idea of putting our blister blockers on on Saturday to assure a good fit was a great idea. 

I really believe that much of a marathon is mental and after all the talk over the weekend about being such an amazing person because I was a TNT alumni,  I almost felt as if the race was over already.  That I'd been given credit for it and that I just had to go through the motions to make it official. I wasn't afraid at all once I started moving.

It was at about mile 12 or so that I realized that I was still 10 minutes ahead of the pace, and I knew that if I just moving I'd be able to achieve the sub-6 goal.  That gave me a ton of motivation for the rest of the day.  At that point, I was going to have to really hurt myself in order to not improve vastly over Bermuda and it was even going to be sort of hard to completely blow the 6 hour thing. (I did come close though!)

As I said, my left knee and hip were pretty achy from about mile 10 forward.  I stopped fairly often during the second half of the marathon to stretch out and to try to keep myself limber.  I think that was smart because they never really felt worse, and now, post race, they feel OK after being iced and taking some Advil. [It's Wednesday and I might have mentioned before that my legs are good as new!]  

The stiff leg could have really messed me up though, if not for that pace band.  It helped me to see that even though my leg sort of hurt, I was still moving at a good pace and that as long as it didn't start to feel a lot worse, it wasn't going to keep me from my goal.  I don't think I am good enough at math to have figured that out without the band reinforcing it every mile. 

Also around mile 10 I ran into a teammate, Gina.  We lost her on the shuttle and this was my first glimpse of her since the hotel.  She said she felt great told me that she had been running most of the way.  She assured me that she was eating her gels every 5 miles (I was the gel KIAP (Know It All Pest) on our training walks) and that she was really pleased with how things were going.  I told her she was moving at a great clip (I was also a pace KIAP).

She took off and I smartly just kept walking.  I saw her once more later when she was in line at a bathroom. I couldn't bring myself to stop and talk to her since I was in the midst of the roughest part of the marathon.  I didn't see her pass me again, so I'm anxious to see where she finished. [Not too far behind me - 6:06 chip time]

I felt awesome at the half marathon point and somehow lucked into a bank of port-a-pottys that had absolutely no line at all.  Well, there was one guy, but he let me go ahead of him since he wasn't actually in the marathon.  That was, luckily, the only time I had go during the race and it only took a second.  I had a big scare in there though, when my sportbrain came unhooked and I couldn't find it.  I thought I had lost it into the horrible porta-john pit of grossness but luckily it was just bunched up in my singlet.  Whew!

As I mentioned by this point, I knew that I was going to finish without any trouble. I lived off that knowledge through the next mile or so of dull, smelly marshland.  There wasn't music along this point, because they weren't allowed to scare the birds. Stupid birds! 

Sure, I had some rough points, especially the stretch between 17 and 21, but I knew I'd finish and finish with a PR.  I can't remember much except that I was slowing down a bit going from 10 minutes ahead of pace to 8. 

I was OK with that though since I was supposed to be meeting Karen at mile 17.  I was really looking forward to seeing her because I thought shed be able to perk up my pace and my mood.  This part of the course was along Mission Bay and that's a pretty residential area.  There weren't any bands that I can remember but there were lots of people out and about cheering and using boom boxes.  One in particular I remember was playing that 'Lust for Life' song and that sort of perked me up a bit.  There was also a hippie, rollerblading, one man band along here too.  He was playing guitar and harmonica while he skated around.  He was fun.  Still, I was getting slow here, and I was dying for some water instead of my lukewarm, watered down Gatorade.

Unfortunately, I must have hit 17 ahead of schedule because I never saw her.  This is again where the pace band helped out.  I used it to kick myself into gear and to make myself adjust my pathetic, sad hobble to a normal walking stride.  I stopped here to stretch a bit and while I was doing that my one and only blister popped -- that made for a miserable quarter mile or so but luckily that was past a lot of peppy cheerleaders (I think the one's that actually won the contest for best cheerleaders) and loud USC people so they revved me up and got me over that problem.

My pace wavered a lot for the rest of the race depending on the incline and the music but mostly I did OK because while I lost some time, I stayed at least 2 minutes below the pace band. 

I still haven't taken my socks off, so I cant say for certain, but I think that I only have one blister.  And I think my toenails will stay normally colored!  Whew! [Correct assessment, as it turns out, and the one blister was fixed on it's own during the race and didn't even require a bandaid!]

Once I passed the 21 mile mark I perked up for sure because I kept telling myself that I only had one VF loop left and I can walk that distance at a good pace in my sleep.

Also around here there were little girls selling sno-cones for 50 cents.  I didn't stop but it got me in the mood for a frozen treat.  I actually seriously thought about stopping at one of the 7-11s I passed to get a slurpee.  Thank goodness I didn't though, because that would have doomed the sub-6.

The finish line was awesome --- they were playing great music [I have no idea what it was but it was loud and it was the END!] and I felt so excited to hit this chip time that I actually mustered up the juice to run the last little bit (a seriously little bit. Way less than the .2 miles!) and I crossed the finish with the biggest, happiest smile!  I was so proud of myself for hitting that time.  I really hope that I timed it right and that my chiptime proves that I beat 6 hours. [It did!]Even if I didn't, I had the best possible race I could have had.  I felt awesome!  In fact, a few hours later, I still feel awesome. [And on Wednesday, I still feel awesome!]

The medals are great, as you saw, and wait until you see the great picture I had taken near a powerbar sign that I found particularly inspiring. [It's on the regular training journal page.]

I should also mention that Pat & Tina also finished the marathon.  Pat came in 7:19 chip time, that I think was about 45 minutes faster than her first marathon in Bermuda.  Tina came in at 8:25 -- she toughed it out!

Last Name

First Name

Gender

Age

City

State

Bib Number

Place

Gender Place

Division

Division Place

Total in Division

Pace

Gun Time

Net (Chip) Time

10K Split

Half Marathon Split

20 Mile Split

Event

Tillger

Helen

F

32

Huntingdon Valley

PA

20280

13296

6487

F 30-34

1331

1721

13:39

6:10:02

5:58:00

1:18:01

2:49:20

4:29:30

Marathon