Corre! Corre! Corre!

Sunday was race day, and we had to wake up early to make it to the starting line in Palermo by 8:30. On the ride over, I mentioned to Carlos that a girl in my Spanish class had a friend in the race, and that this chica had apparently sworn off drinking for three weeks as part of her training. Carlos informed us that he had the same thing in mind when he neglected to have a drink on Saturday evening. “I had beer in the afternoon, yes, but nothing with dinner” he promised.

Feeling pretty intimidated by the training regimens of our fellow competitors, Emily and I selected a location well behind the starting line upon arrival. There were signs directing people who planned to run 4-minute kilometers to head to the front, 5-minute kilometers to head to the middle, and 6-and-over to head to the rear. Since our goal was an hour, we figured that a spot towards the end of the sea of yellow shirts would be best. As soon as everyone started running, however, we quickly realized that achieving our desired pace would be something of a challenge. Everyone was so densely packed together that, if tired, I’m pretty sure we could have crowd-surfed our way to the finish.

Things thinned out a bit around the third or fourth kilometer, however, which was also the point at which I observed one of the funniest scenes from the event. An elderly man with a cane had foolishly attempted to cross Av. Del Libertador before the race, and only managed to make it to the median before the crowd of runners swarmed around him. He was clutching his hat with one hand and a lamppost with the other as he buckled down for what was likely to be a solid half-hour of waiting.

Things got progressively hotter as the race progressed, and Emily and I got separated around the 5-kilometer mark. Nevertheless, we must have been really close, because we ended up finishing within 5 seconds of one another. If you’d like to see our results (and a rather poorly rendered video of our respective finishes) on Nike’s flashy website, you can click here. We’re pretty positive that the times don’t accurately reflect when we crossed the starting line, but that’s okay. We beat an hour either way.

On the way out, Nike representatives handed us medals for participating in the event. Emily has draped hers around one of our bottles of wine. Carlos wore his throughout his daughter’s First Communion party on Sunday evening. Yes, we’re all very proud. (Photo courtesy of La Nacion; there’s a pretty cool photo gallery from the race there also. -NSH