The most fascinating 12 seconds of video you have ever seen! Especially if you like Shaun talking over everything.
Saturday morning was the Hot Chocolate 5K/15K. I sign up for these races to, theoretically, make myself train for them and then, even if I don't, at least get out and do the run itself. With this one, I didn't train and then had to make the fallback from the 15K that I had signed up for to the 5K. Since I just made that decision on my own, I don't get official results. Erica does, though. I'm so impressed with Erica—this marks just about a year since she ran her first official 5K, which was also in pretty chilly weather.
I'm a little disappointed with the run and with RAM Racing (the organizers). I think the race has just grown faster than they're capable of handling—Shaun said that a few years ago when he ran the race it was 3,000 or so runners. This year it was 24,000. It was just too many runners for the course. There were several chokepoints where the whole thing just slowed to a walk as people tried to fit onto a suddenly narrower path. And when we finished the race, we made an attempt at getting our promised hot chocolate, but the lines made us decide that it just wasn't worth it. And while a little piece of chocolate is a fun post-race treat, the more usual banana or bagel would have been welcome (and especially if we'd actually been doing the 15K). We did get a nice hoodie, though :-)
Matt Stratton
I agree. It was really kind of a cluster. The worst was during the 5K on LSD, when people were almost being pushed out into traffic due to chokepoints in the closed lanes.
I did end up getting the fondue and the hot chocolate though...but it was disorganized. Maybe it was timing, but I didn't hit bad lines...but it was VERY unclear where everything was. I sort of stumbled into the fondue line, and when I asked about the hot chocolate, was told it was "across the street", which I assumed meant the other side of Columbus, so I thought I'd missed it. I did later discover it was on the same side as me, and waited in a line of about two people before getting my cocoa and marshmallows :)