Rock n' Roll Marathon

Chris has been training for months for his first official marathon.  You may remember back in May that he ran in an unofficial marathon but he still wanted to run an official marathon.  Plus he did proper training for this marathon.  He chose the Rock n' Roll marathon because every couple of miles they have cheerleaders or a band playing to help keep you motivated. We all made signs to help cheer Chris on and hopefully cheer on the rest of the runners.

The runners really seemed to like this one.

I had someone stop me and ask to take a picture of this one.

Our biggest comment from runners was they wanted to know if the Chuck Norris sign was true.

I did have to stop and take a picture of the sunrise coming up in front of the arch.

Our plan was after we saw him cross the start line we would meet him at around the 11 mile marker.  Chris had told us where we needed to be at and after we cheered him on and several of the other runners we headed that way.  The only bad thing is when you aren't familiar with a city and all of the streets are closed for the race, it becomes very frustrating trying to get there!  We eventually did find where we were supposed to meet him but after we received a text saying that he was at the 13 mile marker we realized that we were in the wrong spot.  I guess the half marathoners and the full marathoners split at the 10 mile mark and you couldn't see that on the race map.  I'm sad that we didn't get to cheer Chris on but all of the runners who saw our signs LOVED them.

Once we realized that we had missed Chris we decided to head back to our hotel and walk to the finish line to meet him.  Our hotel was located right next to the NFL football stadium and they were having a football game that day.  All of the streets leading up to our hotel where closed and we had to pay to park 6 blocks away to make it back to our hotel.  I bet we ended up walking 4 miles that day!

Chris crossed the finish line in 4 hours and 59 minutes.  His goal was to be finished in less than 5 hours and he just made it!  I'm so proud of how hard he's been working towards his goals.  He's already training for the Little Rock marathon in February and he has several more races planned for next year.  I told him that he needs to start picking races in cities that we've never been before so we can plan a vacation around it.