My Leg of Hood To Coast

Can you believe after all that hard work Mai put into sidewalk chalking notes to Jess @ Blonde Ponytail that Mother Nature would have the nerve to send us thundershowers yesterday morning and wash it all away? Well, that is what happened. H2C started off with a bang this year with dumping rain and thunder and lightning. Fortunately the Nuun Lady Bloggers teams had a 12:30pm start so they were still sleepless sleeping in Seattle.

Some of you mentioned yesterday how lucky it was that Jess was going to run right by our house. Not quite so, but Mai and I were blogger stalkerish enough to drive about 30 minutes to Boring, Oregon to sit and wait...

...and wait...

...and watch...

....and try to figure out why Jess still wasn't passing us by.

At 88 degrees, people varied between thankful for our high fives and looking like they wanted to punch us in the face. The little boy with the hose was everyone's new best friend until he actually sprayed them. He was taking no prisoners.

Finally a Nuun van pulled up and parked by us and I saw Jess inside. Inside? Yes. I got her leg wrong. Darn it! This way we got to visit more, though!

I got a great big humongous hug from Marjorie at Taking It On and that was the last I saw of her until she crossed into the finishers chute of Leg 12. It was almost 10pm and too dark for her to see the sign we made her in reference to This POST ...

...but I got an e-mail later that she saw our sidewalk chalk notes - Hooray!

At the hand off it was finally My Time. Well, not really...it was leg two for Tricia @  Endurance Isn't Only Physical.  When I had told Tricia I would be on the waterfront to cheer her on, she invited me to run part of this leg with her. 10pm and no sun, but still pretty darn warm. We ran across the Hawthorne Bridge and the night view was just lovely over the river, then down through the waterfront, past the Steele Bridge and made it just in time to get stuck behind a train for 13 frickin minutes!

...and then Tricia serenaded me with I Play Chicken With The Train when we started moving again. At about the 2.4 mile mark, I had to turn around...it was after 10pm afterall... and I now had to run back to my car by myself through the waterfront, which can be sketchy at night. I gave her a hug and headed back the way we had come, singing out "good job" and "lookin' good" to every headlamp I saw coming my way. About 100 people told me I was running in the wrong direction and before I knew it, I was back at my car and headed home after a very fun bloggy meet-up day.