The Calm Before the Storm

Saturday Night: October 18, 2008



Although this was my second Team in Training event, I’d never made it to the pre-race pasta party before. Since we were travelling to this race, and the pasta party has just two blocks away, this seemed like a great time to start. We walked in to crazy cheers and hollers from the TEAM Staff & Coaches, frantically looking for someone to give us a ticket for Melissa’s husband. It was a bit of a zoo until we finally got his ticket. But we finally found a kind person, grabbed our husbands, found a table, and got food. The pasta was actually really good. Maybe it only tasted good because I’d been warned so much about how bad it would be, I wasn’t expecting much… but I really enjoyed it.

More fabulous than the pasta was the speaking line-up they had. The first person to speak, and the one to introduce all the other speakers, was John Bingham. He was phenomenal. He was funny, motivating, inspiring. All of the runners were in hysterics when he was speaking. Next up – none other than Joan Benoit Samuelson. Wow. I still can’t believe I heard her speak. (For those of you who aren’t runners, or are too young to know who she is – Joan Benoit Samuelson was the first Women’s Olympic Marathon Gold Medalist.) Finally, a survivor/TNT participant told her story and had the room in tears. It was a good night, and got us even more pumped for race day.

We returned to the hotel room, and Melissa and I laid out everything we needed for race day. Shoes? Check. Singlet? Check. Garbage back to huddle under? Check. We each took over a good amount of floor space just making sure we had all we needed. Then, we kicked the boys out of the room, rented a girly movie, and climbed in our beds around 8:00. We needed all the rest we could get before the big day. It was hard to believe marathon day was almost here…