So I did it. Barely, just so you know. Barely. I kept looking over my shoulder during the last two miles to make sure that someone, *anyone*, was still behind me. I guess Mike was just getting ready to start driving the course backwards to see if I had slipped in horse poo and broken a leg, or more likely, been blown off of West Cliff into the ocean. I’m pretty sure he is currently putting together a fantastic story about how I was in fact blown off of the cliff in a hurricane and how I then had to swim 13.1 miles back to shore before completing my run.

The first thing I did when I started running was….well actually the *first* thing I did was walk for awhile because when 2,000 people all take off running from the same spot, actually only about 50 of them take off running. The rest of us just sort of look at each other and smile and start walking in a big mass of people. But once the crowd thinned out enough that I could actually get going I decided to find my running partner. My secret running partner who wouldn’t know that I was placing a mental target on him. It didn’t take long for me to find him. That’s right, you know who I’m talking about: a 70 year-old man, also known as my Arch-Nemesis. Some of you may recall that no fewer than eleven men in their 70s outran me at last year’s Father’s Day Run, which is totally fine except that they kept taunting me with it—passing me by then lagging back then passing me again, then lagging back, then passing me again, like, just to prove that they could or something. I mean REALLY I should be so lucky to be that healthy when I’m half their age…oh wait I AM half their age. Anyway…so I’m stalking my running partner when I notice a tattoo on his calf and I try to run a little closer to make out what it is but he’s really booking so I can’t quite make it out…it’s some kind of little man…it looks familiar….if he would just slow down a little bit I could see it.

It was the Ironman M-dot symbol.

You know, not Robert Downey Jr. I’m talking about those crazy people who do a mega-triathlon: 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, followed by a full marathon. In that order. Without a break. Needless to say, he was long gone by the time I was sabotaged by a nasty, nasty orange-flavored gel handed to me at the second aid station. I started gagging and trying to lick my sleeve to get the taste off and well…I never saw him again.

The wind. The wind was so strong that the waves crashing into West Cliff were actually arcing 10 feet above the cliff and spraying the runners. The cold. It was so cold people were running in jackets, except for one nutter who was bare-chested and barefoot, but I digress. I can’t really complain about The Cold because I hate The Hot, so it was really a blessing. I was absolutely on pace until I hit The Old Cove Landing Trail, which should really be called The Old Cove Obstacle Course or as we might be calling it at my house The Reason Jennifer Now Needs a Hip Replacement. The ground was so uneven and there were big rocks everywhere and sometimes the “trail” was only two side by side lines where tires had made tracks in the mud. During this stretch of the trail, you had to run single file unless you wanted to go seriously off-road through the knee-high grass. I lost some pretty significant time on the Old Cove Trail, but the views were among the finest that Your Higher Power/The Universe ever created on this planet. Runners were actually stopping, stepping off the path and taking photos of each other, then packing up their cameras and resuming the race. Seriously.

Then it started raining. Which at first was refreshing. But when I got back to West Cliff for the final 3 miles there was nothing to block the wind. Nothing. Once there was a tree, but after leaning into the wind for over a mile, the sudden appearance of a wind-break acted like a vaccuum and I nearly ran straight into the tree. I tried to put my hood on to shield my eyes from the torrents of rain, but the wind kept blowing it off my head. The wind was whipping the rain into my face so painfully that at one point I looked around to see who was throwing rocks at me. Why? Why would someone throw little sharp rocks at me while I’m just trying to shuffle and limp the final mile to the beach? Who would be so mean? But I couldn’t see my attacker because of all the rain in my eyes.

And that was about the time that Mike was trying to decide whether he should send out a search-and-rescue team. But I made it. It was literally all downhill from there, until I hit the sand, which is where I found Ian and Noah waiting for me, soaking wet from the rain but holding out an ice chest with a Diet Coke in it. How did I get to be SO lucky??

Running 13.1 miles however was nothing compared to the challenge of changing my clothes in a McDonald’s bathroom about a half hour later. What kind of McDonald’s has one uni-sex single-shooter bathroom?? It’s okay, I thought, I’ll be really quick. But my hands were both frozen and swollen and I couldn’t undo the laces on my shoes which were also completely coated in sand….But I thought maybe I could pull my running pants off OVER the shoes and then pull my dry pants on back over the shoes, but the pants got stuck around my shoes. So I decided to move on to my top while I attempted to use the shoes, fruitlessly, to “walk off” the pants, marching in place. I started to lift off my multiple rain-drenched spandexy tops and got them about half way up but they wouldn’t go any further when someone started knocking on the door. “Juff-a-mint” came my muffled reply. I could not, could NOT, get my top clothing any further up, but neither could I get it back down. My only option seemed to be to exit the bathroom with my pants around my shoes and my arms stuck straight up into the air in the universal position of surrender. More knocking. “Awmuss-dun!” I bent my straight-up arms down to my shoe/pants thinking that maybe I could either grab on to the pants with my frozen fingers or step on my sleeves with my shoe/pants. This maneuver seemed promising for a few minutes until I toppled over but fortunately I landed close enough to the toilet to give it a flush so that the person waiting outside the door would have some kind of sign that it wouldn’t be much longer. I am happy to tell you that the force of the fall knocked my right shoe off and it all came off like falling dominoes after that. I’m pretty sure I left my underwear in that bathroom. I mean…I can’t find them so…. Probably just as well.