Brief Seattle Summary

Well, having arrived yesterday morning on the red-eye from Seattle, and managing to sleep about 45-60 minutes on the plane, I was pretty wiped out. But I got seven plus hours of sleep last night, and am slowly adjusting to east coast time. I am still feeling really tired, because it is not really 6AM to me. It is probably not 3AM either, but it feels like maybe 4 and I am running behind on sleep.

It is going to take me a week or more to fully write about my trip, which included touring around Seattle a bit, doing the race, and then three days of traveling to and hiking in Mount Rainier National Park. I have literally hundreds of photos to go through.

It was an amazing trip, with a lot of great memories and fun moments. Between walking around Seattle, doing the race, and hiking, I covered about 50 – 55 miles on my feet in the five and a half days I was there. I met new teammates from all over the country, including fellow blogger, blood cancer survivor, marathoner, and Team in Training participant Julie from California. She writes the Cures Rocks blog. I ran with kind of purple hair. Four packs of dye pretty much left my brown hair alone but turned my gray hair lavender, and it still has a pinkish tinge. It was not the effect I wanted, and was disappointing.

I set a personal record in the race of 2 hours, 28 minutes, 46 seconds, making my time goal of 2.5 hours. So that was a thrill. I finished 131st in my age / sex group out of 234 people, and my total pace averaging running a walking was 11:21. The weather was cool and cloudy and ideal for this race.

Then Sunday morning, I picked up a rental car and headed to Mount Rainier National Park, which is one of the most beautiful and spectacular places I have seen. I spent 3 days hiking, some of it in snow – it was 102 back in Virginia! How I am going to go through and organize all the photos and memories is still mystifying. I managed to hike about 25 miles in the three days I was there.

Well, gradually over the next week or so, I will give a full series of reports on this blog and on my hiking blog. So stay tuned!