+FillUs

Bill Rodgers After reading so many people's blog on their experience of America's toughest road marathon, the Blue Ridge Marathon, I'm starting to lose my own chain of thought/memory. Bottom line is I had a lot of fun and surprised myself with a sub-4 finish. My estimate was around five hours, or maybe even 5:30 if condition was tough like last year's monsoon. Here's my account of it: Three and a half hour drive from Charlotte straight to packet pickup at Roanoke's Taubman Museum of Art, a modern and iconic building in contrast with the rest of the historical railroad downtown. It was Friday evening and the streets were lively. People were on the patio and on the street with live music playing. I strolled around a little but not too much since I wanted to save my legs. My hotel was only about a mile away. I contemplated on just walking there from the hotel, but ended up driving half a mile or so to park at the Civic Center. Half a mile could be a haul af...

Talk about creativity. If selling vacuum supplies and running supplies in one store is not creative for you, how about watching a drive-in theater movie and running a half marathon? Well, Peter Asciutto from Vac & Dash in Albermarle has made it happen last night. Peter and I The Moonlight Half Marathon & Movie starts and finishes at Badin Drive-In. Race packet pick up began at 7 p.m. and the first two movies began showing at dark. Since the race was going to start at 10:30, I didn't get there till 9:45. Most people were already there and the Hunger Games just started playing. I heard Katniss screamed, "I volunteer! I volunteer!" as I drove in. Have I not seen the movie already, I might have just stayed in my car and watched it instead. At check-in, Peter recognized me from the Idiot Run and came up to greet me. This was only the second time meeting Peter in person, but from our brief conversations and correspondence, and having followed Vac & Dash'...

"Thank you. I really appreciate you doing this," Joey said a number of times during the five or six hours we spent together. He was my runner and I was his pacer. When Elizabeth, the pacer coordinator, introduced us, he already had 50 miles on his feet. That's a total of four loops on the 12.5-mile course, half way for his 100-mile race. I wasn't sure what kind of physical and mental state he was in, so when he started walking, I just followed him. Later, he told me this was his first attempt of the 100-miler, but he had done the 50-miler three times in the past. I guess this is new territory for him and he too wasn't sure how his body would react. After some walking, I suggested some light jogging and we started trucking along. Very small steps, but every step is a step closer to finish. We stopped and walked all the hills, but as soon as we hit some flat and downhill, we'd jog again. I think he surprised himself by how much he could still do. Never been a ...