The first time I took on the challenge of completing multiple running events during a single weekend was at the 2009 Walt Disney World Goofy Challenge where you completed the half marathon on Saturday and the marathon on Sunday. So the idea of doing both of these events, including the 8K in the Philadelphia Marathon Freedom Challenge, wasn’t completely unknown territory to me.
However, this time around I was going to be facing a few different obstacles I didn’t have back in 2009, but I’ll get to those in a bit.
I arrived in Philly on Thursday to get situated before the weekend took off and there was no slowing down. The first thing I noticed was how awesome the people were. I see why Philly is called the City of Brotherly Love. People were super helpful and welcoming and I knew I made the right choice of going this year.
Everything that could’ve gone right for this trip, did. That’s how I knew the stars were magically aligning for it. I know for a fact you can’t force something that isn’t meant to be, so if nothing was going to fall into place, then I would’ve just accepted it and moved on from there, but I’m grateful that wasn’t the case.
If you read my previous post, I talked about how I selected Philly as my next marathon after the Chicago Marathon, and here was another sign of how the stars were aligning…my connecting flight to Philadelphia was in Chicago! And no, that wasn’t intentional. It just ended up that way. So yeah, I do believe this was meant to be.
Shortly after arriving, I was walking down Market Street and it suddenly occurred to me, OMG Rocky ran down this street!!! He turned the corner right there! I’ll admit that made me happily emotional but I did my best to contain myself, and not blurt out that excitement for all to hear, but that was cool.
Another cool thing was seeing the Liberty Bell which was on the list of “must-see” in Philly.
Friday was going to be a busy day and the weather was turning. We arrived at chilly temps and cloudy skies, but some rain and wind moved in for a bit on this day.
For about 10 days before the trip, I weather-stalked Philadelphia. I needed to know what I was going to be potentially facing. I think it’s always a wise thing to do when traveling, but maybe perhaps, not as excessively as I was checking.
Every day and sometimes within an hour, the weather would change. Rain on the weekend, no rain on Sunday, no rain on Saturday, rain on Saturday, windy, no rain, and finally rain was set to happen on Sunday for the marathon and it wasn’t budging.
I better prepare. But how do you prepare when your training has been with absolutely no rain, in the heat, with temps in the 80s and 90s? I guess I’ll find out.
Before hitting up the expo, I got to visit what I truly wanted to visit. The Rocky Statue!!! I couldn’t contain my excitement. Sorry history, but I was more excited to see Rocky than the Liberty Bell. And so super excited to run up the Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art!
This was it. I could’ve turned around, hopped on a plane, and gone home afterward. I didn’t need to do these races! I saw the Rocky Balboa statue and my time in Philly were complete.
But I still had the race expo to go to.
I needed to pick up my bib which would be the same bib I’d use for all the events and as I left to retrieve my shirts, a gentleman walked up to me and asked me which event I was doing. I told him about the Freedom Challenge. He just laughed and said, “Good luck” as he walked away. Oh dear, what did I get myself into?
I went to pick up my marathon shirt and bag, then walked across the way to get my half marathon shirt and bag, and then zig-zagged over to the corner to get the 8K shirt and bag and ended up chatting with the volunteer for about 10 minutes. I think we might know each other’s life stories now, but I just want to say, Thank you Jean for being incredibly wonderful and keep up the running because you’re doing great and I hope you had an amazing time in Jamaica! Yeah, we go way back now.
Speaking of going way back…after I got my goodies, I headed over to pick up more race goodies and ran into social media friend Gerard who was picking up his race goods! I can add this to the list of cool things about Philly!
We chatted for a few minutes and snapped a couple of photos because that’s what you do when you meet amazing people you follow and have followed for several years now on the interwebs.
After Gerard and I parted, I think I spent another few hours at the expo because I still needed to see Bill Rodgers and Bart Yasso, Des Linden, and Meb Keflezighi who were all speaking. They were all so great, funny, and inspiring.
When all was said and done, it was time for me to get ready for Saturday morning and the start of a very tiring, yet fun, wet and wild weekend.
To be continued…
Thank you for reading!