Philadelphia Milestones: My First Half-Marathon

Recently I ran my first half-marathon with Val, Mayor, Ray and his wife Jen in Philadelphia . I finished in 2 hours, 12 minutes (10 minute miles), which was a solid finish considering my lack of training. To document this achievement and recap the weekend, I've put together a list of 13.1 milestones/events that occurred over the course of the trip. Yes, these aren't all "milestones", but it's my best gimmick for setting up yet another list style blog. (Pictured below: We did it!)

1.0 Mayor POPpins

One of the funnest things about taking a road trip with Mayor these days is trying to find music that he’d enjoy (if you choose to indulge him). A few years ago, I think we would’ve had to listen to NPR to appease him, but these days it’s not hard for me to satisfy his interests since I have plenty of Eminem, Blueprint 3 and Katy Perry on my iPod. Some people (most notably my sister) think that I am a movie snob because I always pick apart movies. On the flipside, I’m far from a music snob and I enjoy “mindless pop music” (Lavin, S. Aery, J., circa 2004). Mayor does too and during the road trip we came to the conclusion that we are in the midst of a golden age in pop music. There are some hits that will be played 10 years down the road (LMFAO, Pit Bull/Ne-Yo) and even the bad songs right now would be chart toppers in a normal period. (Pictured below: As soon as we got to Philly, Mayor signed something into law)

2.0 Being Jen Younghans

Despite me, Val and Mayor--let’s just call us “MayGer Val” from now on--getting on the road after Ray and Jen, the Younghanses hit some insane traffic and MayGer Val arrived at the hotel in Philly hours before them. This resulted in me having to check in as Jen Younghans, which made me evaluate the pros and cons of being her. Pro: (1) Fastest run time of our group, (2) Aware of insanely fun TV shows like “Scared Straight” and (3) Husband will go to a wine festival and carry around six bottles of wine for me. Con: (1) Have to buy all the band-aids at CVS because I’m running with a bullet hole in my foot, (2) Husband makes me eat at terrible pubs (see below) and (3) students in my history class hand in papers that say “The Colonists dumped the tea into Pearl Harbor”. Hmm, that’s weird--even some of the cons sound like exciting pros. Being Jen = fun. (Pictured below: Being Jen is more fun since you can run really fast. And the guy next to her is pretty fun too)

3.0 First Expo

The night before the half-marathon, I got my first taste of an expo. The sponsors of the race set up a big expo where you picked up your running number, bought racing gear and got some free stuff. The expo was really a bit disappointing because there just wasn't enough free stuff. The top (and maybe only) free things were (in reverse order from worst to best): (3) Miller Genuine Draft, (2) Snickers Marathon bars and (1) the product with the greatest slogan of all time, which shouldn’t even bother with any other words or nutritional facts on their product than the following: Muscle Milk: "Contains No Milk".

4.0 My First "Real" Philly Cheese Steak
I know the Mayor will disagree with me, but in hindsight I think the Pat’s Cheese Steaks we had were a bit overrated. I'll agree with him that there is something they do to the meat that makes it incredibly succulent, but I'm not a huge Cheese Whiz on steak guy. Next time I'm trying Gino's.

My other Pat's highlight was that we had 35 minutes to get ready to place our order (half-marathon made the stand overcrowded) and they want you to pay them in a microsecond and step down. Sure enough, Mayor short changed the guy by $1 and I started cracking up. In Mayor's defense, placing an order and paying is terrifying. I could've given the guy a $50 bill and not cared if I received any change because I just wanted to step down and get my sandwich without some guy from Philly yelling, “What’s wrong WIT you!?!”

5.0 The Constitution Center
After checking into the hotel the day before the race, MayGer Val had some time to kill so we walked by the Liberty Bell and went to the Constitution Center. I have to admit, that I didn't want to pony up the $12 at first, but it turned out to be one of the best museums I’ve ever been to. It starts in a theatre where you get a state of the art look back at U.S. History, which included a live narrator who looked and sounded like--and was every bit as neat as--Gus from Breaking Bad. After the show, you went upstairs and it was like a hybrid science/history museum that had many interactive exhibits. For instance, to illustrate changes in the law, they had books piled to the ceiling. Finally, you walked out through an eerie room of bronze life size statues of the signing of the constitution. The craziest fact I learned was that Ben Franklin had a Droid and followed me on Twitter.

6.0 Ten Years Later, Ray and I Are Now Even for "The Pledge"

Back in 2001, I made a few friends go see a movie called "The Pledge" with me. It was significant because it was Sean Penn's directorial debut and it starred Jack Nicholson. Well, it turned out to be one of the worst movies ever because it was extremely long and in between each scene there was a 30 second shot of birds flying around. As we watched in agony in the theater, I tried to will the movie to get better, but it didn't help that there was a guy sitting behind us oscillating between snoring and saying things like, "What the hell is going on!?!" After the controversial end of the movie, the guy behind us yells "What!? That's it?!" and Ray proceeds to storm out of the theater, tear his ticket stub up and throw it down the hallway. As a result, Ray always brings up the Pledge and has never forgiven me for making him go see it.

That brings us to The Field House, which is the pub where we ate dinner the night before the race. Ray and Jen had eaten there last year and he said it was really good. Well, we got there and were told that we'd have to wait 45 minutes, but we probably waited about 2 hours. The majority of this waiting was due to a group of Michigan State football fans who had decorated the room with Spartan paraphernalia and watched as their team got beaten down by lowly Notre Dame. Only, they acted like they were winning and remained at their tables after finishing dinner, though Michigan State had zero chance at winning. This caused me and Ray to sign a new bill stating that you need to leave the bar if your team has mathematically lost a game. Mayor ratified the bill into law. We did all this while waiting for our table.

After our wait, we headed to our table where we found that they had run out of several items on the menu (mind you it was only 7PM). They ran out of cheese pretzels which were one of their signature items and Jen’s choice--veggie burgers! I contemplated saying that we had run out of money when the check arrived after dinner. Later, Mayor's chicken pasta came out and was missing one of the two aforementioned ingredients. All in all, it had to be the worst restaurant management I've ever experienced. It would have been better had birds flown through for 30 seconds. So yes, I turned to Ray during the meal and said, "Now we're even for the Pledge" and he said, "You're right Rog. We're even for the Pledge!"

7.0 Two New Facts About Hotels
#1 The whole extra cot strategy should be re-evaluated. They’re perceived as flimsy and Mayor was on the verge of sleeping on the floor instead. However, after we convinced him to get a cot, he received the Rolls Royce of cots which took up almost as much room as the Queen size beds.

#2 According to Val, we squandered a hotel room because we didn't sit around and drink. She vowed that we’d never use a hotel again for simply sleeping over somewhere. Noted.

8.0 @shitmymayorsays
God bless that Mayor, but he says the silliest things. Here are a couple gems:

"I totally forgot. that it was National Constitution Day."

After he said how many books he'd recently bought Jen asked, "What, did you hit up Borders when they were going out of business?"
Response: "I did! Twice!"

There were a couple more of these Mayor-isms, but I can’t recall them. So I just had to do it: http://twitter.com/shitmayorsays. I am going to distribute the password to a group of friends. Never again will silly Mayor statements go undocumented. (Note: “shitmymayorsays” was taken, so I had to modify the name) (Pictured below: Mayor couldn't say anything during the grueling race and neither could I)

9.0 Performance Enhancers
Advil, Chomps, Gu and to a lesser extent vaseline and chafe roll-on sticks. What do all these things have in common? They all enhanced the performance of our respective running times. Look, I get that anabolic steroids and such probably shouldn't be used, but after having three Gu’s and one pack of Chomps to give me enough energy to finish the race, do the steroid enlarged heads of Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire look a little smaller to me today? I have to say yes. Because they did what they did so they could put on a great performance whether it be for the fans, the money, to win or to be the top dog. They wanted it. Let's put an asterisk next to their names if we have to and put them in the Hall of Fame already.

10.0 The Rocky Theme (Eye of the Tiger)
"Da da da dah dah, da da da dah dah!" Does any other city have a song that you can just break into at any time and everyone will enjoy it? I don't think so. It makes turning every corner enjoyable when you're voyaging the city. I'm pretty sure that the Rocky Theme also qualifies as a performance enhancer in Val's case since she said she could barely hear her music during the last 0.1 mile of the run with her brain playing: "Da da da dah dah, da da da dah dah!"

Throughout the weekend, whenever we did the music we'd talk about getting some raw footage of Mayor running up the Rocky steps, put that footage on a thumb drive and slip it into Jon Aery’s Christmas stocking. We never got the video though, which is why we need to go back.

11.0 Surpassing the Aeryan Race
Sometime between mile 9 and mile 10, there was a sign notifying runners that we'd passed the 15K mark. This, of course, is the distance of the Boilermaker--the signature Aery race. I think it's accurate to say that none of the Aerys have run a longer race than 9.3 miles. In fact, after finishing the race MayGer Val all confirmed that we shared the feeling of supAeryiority when we crossed the 15K threshhold. Fine, the Aerys would have slayed our pace, but at the moment they get DNPs (Did Not Play) for half-marathons.

12.0 The Finish!
The last two miles of the race were grueling for two main reasons. First, the clock at Mile 11 was broken, which totally threw a bunch of us off (Note: It was still working when Jen ran by it!). It impacted Ray the most, who was thinking about making a dash to get under two hours, but kept his pace when he couldn’t see the clock. Second, there was no shade on the back end of the race and only one water station in the final three miles. This was a back breaker, but it made it that much better when we finished. I was especially happy to find out that the answer to Val's question that she kept asking before the race was "No". The question: "Am I gonna die?"

After the race, there was a free Brett Michaels concert where Brett pointed at me and I pointed back at him. Sorry to the other people in our general vicinity who stumble upon my blog andthought that Brett was pointing at them.

13.0 The Walking Dead
I'm not just being Aerygant. There's a huge difference between 9.3 miles and 13.1 miles and the 1.5 mile walk from the race to the hotel room was one of the longest, most difficult ones of our lives. We gravitated towards the curb "ramps" on street corners and avoided having to step up like zombies would avoid sunlight. We walked backwards because it felt better. We contemplated switching places with a 2-year-old being pulled in a wagon by his dad, but ultimately decided against it. The walk was that bad.

13.1 It's Not Benjamin Franklin Up There
It's William Penn. Damn, I used to think that my oldest Twitter follower was perched above Philly!

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