I did it!

1845 716/4345 F 161/753 F3034 2:01:00 9:14 11713 Jennifer Stanford Vancouver,BC 1:58:53

Special thanks to NB for the delicious home cooked dinner Saturday night and to Sully for the healthy dessert. After setting Diggs up on the air mattress it was off to bed as we had an early wake up called scheduled for the morning. Battle Oatmeal came to be when Diggs stated he didn't need to eat anthing before the race and I inhaled a double serving of quaker instant oatmeal. Then it was off to the races as NB...being the marathon fairy that she is (I just came up with that) was kind enough to pick us up and drop us off at the stadium for 6:00 AM.

After some volunteer chaos at the stadium I was finally able to switch to participant mode about 15 minutes before the race was to start. Things were not looking good heading to the start line as we hadn't found our regular running partners and it was pouring rain. The gun went off...actually we were not even sure about that and I started off with PD one of the ladies I run with on Saturday mornings. The first 5 miles felt awesome and i felt strong right up the Prospect Pt hill. Diggs and I finally found one another again going down the hill and stayed together until about 2 miles to go. At this point Diggs realized that I was in fact beating him having started a few minutes back from him. It was at this point he took off like a bat out of hell and finished the race with a 14 second lead over me.

Big thanks go out to ML, NB and LE for cheering me on as came into that final stretch. Thanks ladies!

The pictures below really are great as they show me finishing the race. I'm smiling as I can see two of my friends (JM & EF) at the finish line. What's really cool is that they even caught us hugging. EF had a great run and came in around 1:55 and JM got to hold the finishers tape.