12 miles!

It was hot this morning. I choke when I run in the heat. Therefore, I choked. I was more worthless than a show of hands at a presidential “debate.” I choked so bad I didn’t even finish the training run with my team—I had to walk off some of my light-headedness and I came in nine minutes after they did. Which actually surprised me; I figured I was more like 20 minutes behind them. Stupid light-headedness. It even fucks up my perceptions of space and time.

But I still have pictures!

Here we are before the run. We didn’t all plan to wear our yellow AIDS Marathon shirts today. Honest. In fact, I find them itchy so I have no intention of ever wearing mine. But I did manage to grab a yellow shirt when I got dressed this morning. We’re so in tune with each other as a team it’s almost SPOOKY:

Here’s another picture before the run. Perhaps I should have spent more time psyching myself up for a battle with heat stroke and less time mugging for the camera:

Here I am with Fearless Leader Matthew and George somewhere around mile 8. We’re all that remains of last year’s team. Some cultures think that when you have your picture taken, you lose a bit of your soul. (Come to think of it, how often has Dubya had his picture taken? Just wondering.) After today, I think that when you have your picture taken, you lose some of your ability to run with your team, for it was shortly after this picture that I started to crash:

Here are a few of us after the run—once Pokey the Blogger managed to waddle his sluggish ass across the finish line. Again with the yellow shirts:

Our whole team, minus one guy who was off peeing and we didn’t notice because we were hungry and we wanted to get our damn picture taken so we could go get some damn food:

We usually have our post-run gorging at a diner in Boystown that has remarkably mediocre food but for some reason plenty of seating. We were getting pretty tired of bland eggs and cold pancakes, though, so this week we headed to Ann Sather, a local Swedish landmark with food that’s generally a few notches above mediocre. Unfortunately, it was pretty crowded and we were all rather gamey, so instead of having a whole back room to stink up by ourselves, we were crammed in among the respectable folk who didn’t smell like living crime scenes: