All that's left to do is run

Woo hoo! We're in chilly Memphis, TN tonight resting up for tomorrow's St Jude Memphis Half/Full Marathon. We left home around 10.20 this morning (only 20 min behind schedule) after dropping Pips off at the kennel and returning our rental car. It's pretty weird to have the old ride back. It feels HUGE! We've already found 3 things wrong with it (busted driver's seat paneling, major scratch on the driver's side passenger window - not sure HOW their obviously top notch QC missed that one, and the driver's door doesn't really shut right/completely) so it will be going back to its home away from home Monday. Fantastic. About an hour into the 3.5-4 hr trip we realized we forgot the toaster, bagels and PB. We stopped for lunch in Jackson. If you're ever traveling through TN don't waste your time in Jackson. We went to college near there and it's pretty gross. It's totally full of homely people and people in overalls. Seriously. Lots of bad holiday sweaters were spotted at lunch. While we were stopped we went ahead and bought a toaster and some eats at Walmart and made our merry way to Memphis. It's very weird to be back here, my parents lived out in the 'burbs so on all our visits back here after we moved away we never came back downtown, so it's probably been about 8 yrs since I've been down here. I have to admit, they've done some revitalizing! It's much nicer than it used to be, with lots of shopping and even Beale Street has been cleaned up a bit. We went to the expo first, it was VERY small with no guest speakers or anything like that. From there we found our hotel, the Doubletree, and it is NICE! We're right at the finish line and just a couple of blocks from the start. We read through all our race info and goodies. Fun fun!! I love it!!! They even gave us a little bag of brown rice. I was so excited I pulled it out and waved it above my head until I realized MY bag had a little hole in the top so now there's rice on in our bed. LOL! I scooped some up at Brent and wished him a happy wedding day. =) A lot of the restaurants had special pasta dinners so we picked a pasta buffet being hosted at Isaac Hayes. It was really good, and they had a special section for all the people participating in the race to sit in near the buffet. Afterwards we walked around Peabody Place a little and around Beale Street. It was neat, it was crazy to see all the places my friends and I did goofy things in high school. Now we're back kicking our feet up and counting down the minutes until the race! The weather is going to be a crap shoot, there's rain and severe thunderstorms in the forecast tomorrow but noone knows when. It seems like tomorrow am will be lighter rain and tomorrow pm will be the severe stuff. We packed pretty much ALL our running clothes so we're set no matter what!

Well, I'm going to go and hydrate!! I'm rested, relaxed and have all my gear ready to go. Now all we have to do is run the race. Left foot, right foot, repeat.