The Day Before

Let’s back this up to the weekend for a little bit. If you read Michelle or Melissa’s blog, you might be sick of hearing about this already. So I guess this post is for those of you who don’t and for me when I’m old and forgetful and want to remember that weekend when I ran a race slower when I was sober than when I was drunk.

Saturday started when my chauffer picked me up at the house and we left for our 4-hour drive from Orlando to Miami. Besides almost dying 3 minutes into the drive when someone cut us off, we made it safely to the hotel (Hyatt Regency) where we planned on meeting up with Melissa. Now, Michelle and I had never met Melissa before, but when we heard she was going to run the race with us, we asked her if she wanted to share a hotel room. She said yes in about 2 seconds and we’re still grateful she didn’t turn out to be a total creeper.

At the hotel, we said our hellos and checked into the room where we had a pretty sweet view of the city.

And then we promptly left to walk to the free shuttle service that brought us to the expo. We didn’t quite know where we were going, so when a strange man carrying all his luggage told us to follow him. We did.

Luggage guy was running the race too (and had run several of the other races Michelle and I have done) and we were all happy he didn’t seem interested in murdering us. When we got to the shuttle area, we had about 10 minutes to kill before the next one arrived. And that’s when I saw the petting zoo. With OMGcutebunnies!

And goats.

Sorry about the pig butt. I almost feel like I should put a sunburst on that thing. Anyway, Michelle and Melissa were totally not as interested in the petting zoo as I was so they didn’t even walk over to see it because they have no souls.

We got on the shuttle (ahem, school bus) shortly after and the 7 mile drive to the expo took forever. Miami traffic blows. But we were happy we weren’t the ones driving in it.

We got to the expo and did our expo thing. We picked up our bibs and t-shirts (They let Michelle and I change out our shirt size no problem. Usually expos are really picky about that.) We looked around for a bit and I bought a pair of Wright socks, which were $3 cheaper than at the running store at home. Other than that, it was really crowded and nothing special. Your basic expo.

We hopped the shuttle back to the hotel and got ready for dinner. We were starving and didn’t want to walk anywhere, so we ate at the hotel restaurant. We had a little bit of a wait, so we did the only smart thing to do the night before a race. We ordered a drink.

Hello Coconut Lime Cooler, you delicious devil you.

I say you can never have enough filters on a picture.

Once we were finally seated, we all decided to have the Latin buffet.

It was really good but probably not the best idea for a pre-race meal. I had salad, yucca, rice and black beans, chips with house-made guacamole, and some pasta thing. Because I guess pasta is Latin now.

Pork and chicken were also served along with the buffet, but it was nasty. We all decided it would be more fun to be poked in the eyeball with a fork rather than eat it.

After we stuffed ourselves, we all agreed we were too full to eat another bite. That is, until Melissa found a couple cookies she wanted to have her way with. (I think she gets to know them first.)

Then back at the room, she and Michelle had their way with a pillow they both kept calling by our waiter’s name. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on there. I do know, however, that pillow has been touched by many, many strange hotel hands. And now, two sets of lips.

After the pillow molestation, we all called it a night since we had an early wake up for the race. 🙂