More Marathon Stories

First a big thank you to everyone who commented on my marathon race report. Your kind words mean a lot. I never expected to get 36 comments (so far) on any post ever, I had no idea so many people read this thing.

Today I'm enjoying some R R & R; Recovery, Rest & Relaxation. I did some yoga this morning, and I'll try to get a few miles of running in tomorrow just to work the legs out. It's nice to be able to walk down stairs again.

I'm feeling better today from the hydration problems too. Monday I felt like a drunk coming off of a 3 day bender. Kind of stumbling around, no short term memory, slurred speech, all that fun stuff. While I did manage to get in a few funny anecdotes about our weekend into the report, I realized there are more stories that I want to share. I'm still waiting on the pictures to come back from the disposable camera I carried with me, but there are some other pics I want to share as well.

The official results are not posted yet, but here's a pic of some of the prizes I brought home. The finishers medal has the Hatfield & McCoy logo with their pictures and is really heavy. The back has "Finisher June 13 2009 10th annual" on the back. The mason jar is supposed to be a moonshine jar. They put a peice of wood in there with the H & M logo on it noting my 128th place finish. Every finisher got one noting where they placed. The T-shirt looks neat, they said it was the first time they put a pig on the t-shirt. And the book on the left is an illustrated history of Pike county Kentucky. I won this as a door prize during the pasta dinner the night before the race! Kelley makes fun of me for being lucky with door prizes, and I won the first door prize given away! Of course, I'm not any more interested in a pictoral history of Pike County Kentucky than they would be of a history book from Greenville county, SC. but it's still nice to win. I know they are trying to promote tourism to the county.

This is the tree that snapped in half thursday night. I still haven't gone out there to cut it up yet. So there is 40' of trunk still in the ground, I'll have to cut that down after I get rid of this 30' piece that snapped off and fell down. It fell right on the gate out the back of the fence, so I also have to replace the gate, 1 fence post, some toprail that was bent. And it crushed and shredded my muscadines. Those vines were really looking good this year, and it broke 2 of the 4x4 posts, so I'll have to replace those, all 3 vines were ripped up from the ground too. There are 2 other sweet gum trees behind that one and some other ugly shrubs in that area of the yard, I think I'm going to cut it all down, level out the ground some and start over in there. Should take me until about October to get it all done. And that is not how I wanted to spend my summer.


The roads up in Ky/WV are all cut out of the mountains. This side of the mountain range is a harder rock base (I guess) than the eastern side. The NC mountains don't have anything cut out that looks like this for the roads. The way they cut the stone out left cool marks, all kinds of color patterns, it makes for some really neat landscape shots.

Right outside of our hotel room after the marathon, we started hearing all this weird stuff. Turns out it was a bagpipe gathering thing practicing before going to the H&M festival. Drums, bagpipes, kilts the works. Really cool.

Hot Mamas Maternity is a retail store near the hotel in Williamson, WV. Did I mention that Kelley's cousin Margot is pregnant with twins? This sign made us laugh so hard thinking about Margot. She's having one boy and one girl, and she's already got two boys. I already have sympathy for anyone who tries to date the girl and has to win the approval of her 3 brothers. But Hot Mamas seems like a trashy fun place.