Marathon weekend

Holy.  Can't believe it's been two weeks since I posted!

Things have been going swimmingly.  Work is nuts, weekend are nuts, I'm going nuts.  There.  You're all caught up.

After a really long week at work, I would have loved to have made a nest and done nothing for my weekend.  But, that wasn't in the cards.

Friday night was Erin's birthday.  So irregardless of my exhaustion, if it's your friends birthday, attention must be paid.

Erin decided to have a wine tasting party.  She registered at Banville, we all ordered wines from the registry and then met up on Friday to try them all.  Banville was great in providing guidance as to which wines to try first, food pairings etc.

I have never really smelt my wine.  I probably should, I mean that's part of the whole wine deal.  But this time I did.  I shoved my nose into the glass and took a deep breath.  After mulling about what I thought I smelt I checked the descriptions to see if I was close.  I nailed one that described a blackberry aroma and I got another one that had a cherry smell (although my description of cherry was ghetto compared to the winery label... something about cherry skins or something).

There was one wine that smelled like cat pee.  100%.  Now, the wine tasted fine, but the smell?  Seriously off putting.  The majority of the wines I liked with one exception, this Vaglio Chango.  It was not great.  Some of my friends said it had a chalky taste and thus, the following label was born.

Such a good time.  We made it home at a decent hour, because we had to be up early for race set up.  Logan and I headed out to Assiniboine park for 9am for the WPS Half Marathon race set up.

There is always a myriad of things to set up; fencing, tents, tables, merchandise, finishing line, advertising banners.  We have it down to a fine science, but it still takes our crew all Saturday to do.  Logan and I got home somewhere around dinnertime.

Race morning is an early one.  Committee members have to get to the park by 5 - 5:30 am.  Rise and Shine.  Speaking as a non morning person, this is especially painful.  As in past years, we have the boys come volunteer with us, so they were super excited to get early as well (sarcasm sign).

Having the boys together is just a recipe for fighting, so Zach went with Brad to help with relay stuff and Logan hung out with me at the Finish.

Nick, Rob, Jason, Logan & me

Now despite the early hour, this day always gets me in the feels.  Over the course of the day, we had runners who were still doing cancer treatment, kids running in their first 5K ever, runners taking part in remembrance of someone they have lost, so it can be very emotional.  I was really touched by one particular runner; a young boy, running with a framed picture of his Dad.  How can you not be affected by that?

Race went really smoothly.  We had a few hiccups, but that's to be expected. You can't possibly plan for everything.  If the weather is cold, you run out of hot chocolate and coffee, if it's hot, you run out of water.  It's hard to plan for that when you don't know what the weather is going to be like until a few days prior.

We got home from the race around 4pm Sunday afternoon and I was done.  My feet were screaming.  My job doesn't exactly require me to be on my feet all day long and I was on my feet the entire weekend.  That being said it was a good exhaustion, knowing you'd contributed to something worthwhile.

So that was my weekend.