Race Review: Seattle Rock n' Roll Half Marathon (Part 1)

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Wow what a weekend! As I spoke about last week this past weekend was my first double race weekend!

To start off a HUGE weekend of running, on Friday I woke up at 4:00am and headed over to Surrey for the Marathon Kick-Off Event!

We had some delicious free coffee and spent some time chatting with some other local runners. Those who signed up on Friday got a $25 discount on Marathon registration! If you missed out but still want to join me on this great local run, you can register here.
The rest of the morning was spent packing and getting everything organized for the weekend and right on time (almost...) we were headed towards Seattle! I was pretty excited about the expo because the Portland Rock n' Roll Expo was pretty awesome. I certainly wasn't disappointed:

I picked up a couple of small things at the expo, one of which being a SpiBelt which I've heard a lot about recently:

You may be wondering why there is a pop can inside, well the lady at the booth made very clear that the pouch was so big it could fit an entire can of coke so I decided to try it out when I got home and it would in fact fit a pop can. I've never run a race without a water belt longer than 5k, at the expo I decided I would try something new this time around...







After a delicious stop at the Cheesecake Factory for dinner we headed back to the hotel to go to bed early... Well maybe not quite:

After laying out our run clothes and some shenanigans modeling our PJ's and all of our sparkly soul headbands we finally went to sleep ready for our early wake up call! I was the last to get out of bed... I wasn't feeling entirely ready to run but alas I was there so I eventually dragged myself out of bed and got dressed... We hopped on the monorail and made sure to get a nice shoe shot:

It wasn't more than 2 minutes until we had arrived under the Space Needle ready to go find the bag check and hit the restrooms. Here was our first professional picture of the day, looking a little sleepy still:

In this case our iPhone picture turned out a lot better!

After grabbing a bagel from this insanely huge bagel pile we headed to the restrooms:

The port-a-pottie line was quite a bit longer than expected. As Nikki and I were in corral 15 there was no real rush for us, but Sarah was in Corral 6 so at this point we separated and Sarah went off to hopefully find a shorter line. We heard the start from the lineup and at that point I started to get a little nervous but reminded myself that worst case scenario I'd start in a further corral which doesn't really matter because of course it's chip timed. Finally we got that out of the way and after a quick look around for Sarah we headed to the start not without another photo of course:

 We decided we'd hang out near the front and wait for our corral to get closer. Here we ran into Mom vs. Marathon, that was exciting because I've hardly ever met any of the bloggers I follow in real life! It's too bad we didn't get a photo! Nikki and I got one right before we jumped into a corral:

This post is getting a little long so I will post the second half of my race review tomorrow! Stay tuned!