Santa Cruz

There's an ice cream place in Santa Cruz that has the craziest flavors of ice cream. We used to go all the time in college. My favorite was the black licorice ice cream that looked like a dark grey scoop of asphalt, but they also make garlic, ginger, and other unusual flavors.

They have the same crazy wallpaper they did when I was in college too. Oliver wasn't all that excited about his sugar-free ice cream, but my dairy free strawberry was super yummy. Toby seemed to like his German chocolate cake.

I had french fries and falafel salad for dinner - not the traditional pre-race pasta dinner, but pretty tasty, nonetheless.

We stayed at the Motel 6 in Watsonville, and got very little sleep.

Here I am making myself cross-eyed taking a picture of myself in the mirror at entirely-too-early-for-a-person-to-be-up-and-doing-these-things.

The race was crazy crowded. We had to walk the first 2 miles because it was a mob. This made me insane because I was so excited to be there and was so cold, (Santa Cruz was 40 degrees cooler than Sacramento) that I just wanted to run! But, it started to thin out a little more after that and I was still able to finish within an hour and a half. I had been worried about being the last one to finish - that was really silly of me. There were thousands of people after me! Thousands of people ahead of me too, but I didn't make a complete fool out of myself, which was one of my goals.

Santa Cruz is wild as it is, but this race, to me, really showcased it's unique and wonderful qualities; the natural beauty, the surf, the sand, the fantastic-for-jogging foggy weather, the boardwalk, the local bands playing all along the route, the surfers, the transexuals, hippies, and overly-tanned bald shirt-less fat men, and everything in between - all of us, running together, with Elvis impersonators and other costumed runners, devils, brides, a giant bunny rabbit, while kilt-wearing bagpipe players - stilt-walkers, and families out on the side of the road, banged on kitchen pots and pans, hosed us off with their garden hoses, and cheered us on!

It was kind of a zoo, but really fun - and I'm hoping to run a half-marathon next.

After the race, we went to brunch in Capitola with my college roommate, Angie, who also ran with me. We ran side by side for most of it, but got separated around the 5th mile. Thankfully we both had cell phone arm pouches to balance out our iPods on the opposite arm, and we were able to meet back up for brunch after getting our T-shirts and goodie bags.

Then we dropped off Angie, and headed back home.