Long Runs down the Beach

Back at the beginning of February we took a trip with my parent’s and my sister to Southern California. We left late on a Friday afternoon and flew to Long Beach Airport. I love Long Beach airport. It is just a cute little place, so much nicer than the big city-size airports around there. Added bonus is we get to ride on Jet Blue. I prefer that airline to most others because of the amount of leg room. I know we are not the tallest people to ever fly, but we are tall enough that a flight can get pretty tight. I enjoy the few extra inches.

We stayed at a very nice hotel. It was a time-share condo place, very swanky. We pulled up to check in and there were pretty fountains lit up at night. It was nice. Our room was super swanky too, we were close to the pool and hot tub (which somehow we never used).

Saturday morning we all piled into the car and headed to Disneyland. Our first stop was to get fast passes to the World of Color show. Once we had those in had it was a free for all and we had a good time riding rides and just enjoying the wonderful weather (it was about 70, it had been 2 at home a few days before we left).

My mom and dad were Heroes and drove down to Huntington beach to pick up race packets while the rest of us played around Disneyland a little more. They had a hard time of it, parking far away, wading through crowds of people, then getting stuck in traffic. But I know we appreciated their sacrifice as we watched Captain EO and rode the Jungle Cruise.

Once they got back we lined up for the World of Color show. It is an amazing show, I just don’t totally understand the concept of making people stand up to watch it. For the show they have these huge fountains (think Las Vegas) set up in the lagoon and they shoot them off and shine lights and project movie clips on them all set to Disney music. It is amazing – but only if you can see. This is when being tall comes in handy, we could see, but there were a couple of women next to me that were having a hard time finding a view.

After the show we booked it out to the car and drove home to try and get some sleep before the early wake up the next day.

Sunday was race day. We woke up way too early and got ready for the race. Then we drove down the Huntington beach to park and take the shuttle to the start. The shuttle was a nice yellow school bus. Yep, high class all the way. I remember busses being a little bit bigger.

We got to the starting line with plenty of time to spare so we wandered through the exhibit tent a little and stretched out and got ready for a run. They lined people by their expected finish time, so I was pretty far back. I think it took about 40 minutes for me to get across the starting line. Matt was my awesome pit crew and followed me down the corral all the way to the start.

Then I was off. OK, not really, I took it pretty slow because I had only been “training” for about a month. And I use training very loosely. That means that I had first gotten on my treadmill about a month before, and had probably gotten on it a few times since then. I didn’t’ want to hurt myself, so I didn’t make any plans to break records on this race. It was just a nice run down the beach.

And that is what it turned into. The course went up and back down the Pacific Coast Highway with one little detour inland to add a few miles. It was a little foggy (marine layer) and that felt really nice to run in. I pushed my way through a few crowds of people. Apparently I started too far back and had to do some good dodging of people until I fell into a place that was moving about my pace.

The course had a lot more hills than I expected. Up and down constantly. They were not huge hills, but that doesn’t matter at mile 8.

I hit a wall about 11 miles into the race and started to feel pretty bad. But I was almost there, so I put my head down and tried to push it out. Matt was standing at mile 12 with a sign he made for all of us. I totally missed it! I was too busy just trying to stay alive! But I was happy to see him and push it just one more mile.

When the race was over I realized we didn’t make any kind of plan of where to meet up. So I wandered around for a while until I found my family and Matt caught up with us. Then it was a trek back to the car – we had to wait for our school bus to take us back to the parking.

My mom and dad were heroes again and had to sit through a sales pitch at the condo while the rest of us stretched and showered and ate and slept.



Sunday was also the Super Bowl. We turned it on and watched the National Anthem (or what was supposed to be the National Anthem). We debated if we should sit in the room and watch the game or go out to Disney again, and Disney won. It was nice to keep moving and get some blood to my muscles, plus it is always fun to go to Disneyland. We watched Fantasmic that night, but the Dragon was broken (still, or again) and it was missing some of the magic because of that.

Monday we had a small crisis. Somehow we had lost Matt’s ticket the day before (It might have been my fault, but you can’t prove it). So after we got packed and drove out to Disneyland we had to stand in line at customer service and convince them we are honest people who just lost a ticket. They were great and issued Matt a new one so he didn’t have to sit outside all afternoon. We finished up Disneyland and took in the few last things that we wanted to do before we had to go home.

But then, like always happens, it was time to go home. I remember riding the escalator to the parking garage and just looking at the blue sky, standing there in my shorts and sandals, and thinking how long it was going to be before I could feel that again. But the trip was over, and it was time to come home to the cold. And cold it was. It was snowing when we landed and drove everyone home. I great welcome back to the state of Utah and a sad goodbye to California, Disneyland, and the beach.