Day two: the anxiety mounts

Boy. Everything is really kind of a blur. We get up and head over to the expo. I will interject here that two people I know that ran Boston gave me advice. One of them recommended I get to the expo when the doors open because it would be a zoo. The other recommended that I be wary of the downhill aspect of the marathon. Apparently I am not good at taking advice (I'm sure all my friends are nodding their heads sagely as I write this).

The expo was a facking zoo. It was a bedlam. Everyone was lining up to get their Boston gear (so they could wear it around town before the race, apparently). Picking up our race packages was easy. Shopping was hard. As I stood in the lineup with my t-shirt, jacket and pullover I felt like a whore. This isn't what Boston is about. It's not about consumerism or the jacket. I don't think Dick Beardsley was spending inordinate amounts of time and money on pretty trinkets when he ran it in 1982.

Funny you should mention Dick Beardsley. My pace leader, who I love and saw with his shirt off once, lent me the book "Duel in the Sun" about the epic race between Dick Beardsley and Alberto Salazar. I read it during the copious number of flying hours it took to get to Boston and it was a fantastic, motivating and intriguing book. I arrived in Boston with much more reverence and appreciation for what the Boston marathon is and the impact it had on these athletes lives.

But back to the huge lineup at Adidas. It was huge. And I still bought the stuff and I felt kind of dirty afterwards.

Returning to our hotel room Michael realized that the technical shirt that we got with our race package was the wrong size. We walked all the way back to the convention centre, exchanged it, and returned home after taking a detour to find out where the buses would be picking us up the next day.

Long story short: we walked a lot on a day when we were supposed to take it easy and go for a mere three mile run.

Then we met up with some other people from our clinic for photos at the finish line. I swear we were tempting fate. I swear it. They all showed up with their Boston jackets! Taking photos at the finish line! Are there no sacred cows?

We all went for dinner and then returned home to bunk down for the always sleepless night before the big day.