Marathon Morning (part 1/3)

I just haven’t had time to blog lately but there is so much I have to share about my experience with the NYC Marathon. I’m going to quickly sum up my race week experience…
I met Joan my former Peds CF doc and close friend of mine at the Javits Center for the expo. Since I have CF I was able to sign her up as an “official guide” for me and she is jumping in at mile 10 to be my running buddy for the remainder of the race. I’m soooo happy she will be with me to share this experience with me.
Saturday evening Boomer Esiason himself took the Team out to dinner and gave us a “pregame talk”. His son Gunnar was there as well. During dinner I got to talk with a few members of the team and we shared our CF stories. I loved how it felt to be closer to the CF community, not only though the computer but in person. Dinner didn’t last long since it was race day evening and we all had to get home for a good night sleep!
After a horrible nights sleep, my anxiety levels must have been through the roof, my alarm went off at 4:00 and it was time to quickly get dressed grab my bags and head to Central Park. The day was finally here, November 7, 2010. The day I was preparing for since April, the day of the NYC Marathon.
So down to Central Park we drove, hubby dropped me at our bus, I grabbed a bagel and hopped on. The sea of busses lining Central Park South slowly began to move and a large lump gathered in my throat. Off we went on the drive though Manhattan, Brooklyn and finally to the start in Staten Island. As we were stopped on the bridge we all looked out the windows toward the Manhattan skyline and thought “really? I have to run all the way back there!?”
We made our way off the bus and to our tent in charity village. (I’ll save you the bathroom etiquette – or lack there of – of my fellow marathoners). It was now 8:30ish and I was in wave three of the race, my start time wasn’t until 10:40, so needless to say I had a lot of time to kill! I ate a bit, drank lots of Gatorade, ‘glided’ up, pinned on my number and dropped off my bag with the UPS trucks. Walking around the start village with 43,000 other marathoners was crazy! The NYRR had everything very well organized but it was still hard not to feel intimidated by the sheer number of people.
10:00 came and it was time to get into the corrals. Three other woman on Team Boomer came to my corral with me, Whitney a mom to two CF boys, Haylie a college CFer and her running partner. The cannon went off for wave two and we saw 20,000 people run across the Verrazano Bridge! WOW!! What an amazing site that was.
It was on the colder side so I still had on my sweats, hat and gloves as I made my way to the starting line with Whitney who was going to be my running buddy for the first 10 miles…