Our family had a great time this past Saturday at ASU running/walking in Pat's run at ASU. For those of you not familiar with Pat Tillman, he was an outstanding athlete that played football for ASU and the Arizona Cardinals. After the attacks on 9/11/2001, he decided to give up his football career and joined the Army and became a Ranger. While serving in Afghanistan he was killed in a tragic friendly fire disaster. The run celebrates his life and supports a charitable foundation in his honor.
We got up at 4:30 AM and left the house just after 5:00. We wanted to have plenty of time to get down to a park & ride at 38th St. and Washington, where we rode the Light Rail right down to the ASU stadium. We were pretty sleepy but we made it! We knew there would be tons of people there and wanted to avoid the traffic and freeway closures. The light rail is very cool and efficient. One thing that is kind of different is that you pay for your ticket at the kiosk at the station, but no body checks to see if you have one once you get on - it's sort of an honor system - I kind of liked it.
The weather was just about perfect, cool but not cold. We got to the starting line in plenty of time. There were 20,000 participants signed up, that's a lot! We pretty much filled up the Packard Street. We had our official 'Technical T-Shirts' and timer tag chips on our shoes. With so many people, there is no way you could all start at the same time so they did a rolling start with the faster runners in the front and the walkers in the back. When you made it to the starting line, a sensor on the ground read your tag on your shoe for your start time. A similar reader at the finish line automatically calculated your individual run time - pretty cool.
Every one did great, the walkers in our group are very competitive and had to pass anyone with grey hair that they saw. There was one guy that they kept passing but somehow he would get back in front of them. There was no way he was going to finish before they did! I was able to beat my goal of under 40 minutes (35:48)
After we had some refreshments at ASU, we had an amazing breakfast at Flapjacks.
There was a really good positive feeling in the crowd. We had such a great time we all want to do it again. I hope many of our readers will join us next April.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
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