The early bird gets the parking spot. And all the time in the world to blog about it.

GOOD NEWS! I got Doris Day parking for this morning’s Marion Arts Festival 5K (the second race of my epic, internationally celebrated, cooler-than-a-stupid-royal-wedding Summer Of Running Away From Being 50!) because I not-very-good-at-guessing-how-many-people-would-be-running-the-race-ingly got here 75 minutes early to avoid the inmates-loose-in-the-madhouse-level lines at the packet pickup.

SUBSEQUENT GOOD NEWS! I’m so early that there’s nobody here yet so I have nobody to talk to and therefore plenty of time to take (multiple!) selfies and write ridiculously-long-compound-adjectived Facebook and blog posts.

BONUS! The race bags that we get at the packet pickup for this 5K contain free samples of (respectively) BioFreeze menthol gel and Udderly SMOOth skin cream, which you usually get only for half and full marathons where you’re all but guaranteed to get (respectively) cripplingly painful muscle injuries and cripplingly horrifying chafed, cracked, unstoppable-fountains-of-bloody nipples. So this 5K might be pretty badass. Or badnipples.

ALSO BONUS! My bib number is 99, which is somehow really cool to me. It’s very symmetrical. And it’s unmissably safety-pinned to my chest. Like my very-symmetrical-unmissably-safety-pinned-to-my-chest-and-apparently-a-looming-threat-in-this-5K bloody nipples.

LET’S SAY IT ONE MORE TIME! Nipples!

#HowToTurn50 #Nipples!