Rock Creek - 2006 MCM

I’m not a fan or Rock Creek Park. There’s a reason for this. Olga and I did a training run in RCP. I was slower than her. I was frustrated about that. She was frustrated that I couldn’t keep up with her. I was getting annoyed at her for telling me to run faster. I was having problems eating while running and my stomach was giving me grief. It also rained on that run. It was cold and we were shivering when we finished the run. All in all, not good times.

When we hit RCP in the marathon I remembered the training run. But it wasn’t a bad thing. I remembered how the training run sucked, but I also immediately saw how things were a lot different now. We were both OK with running the pace I was at. Food wasn’t an issue, because of the power shots. The weather was great and we were having fun. Doing RCP on the marathon was fun.

The way the course is set up you run north up RCP for a few miles, then turn around and run back. So you get to see a lot of other runners both in front of you and behind you. This was the first place Olga and I saw two of the other runners from work. It was really neat to be able to pick out our friends in the thousands of people running.

We also got our first look at the dreaded wuss busses. There is a time cut-off at twenty miles. You have to keep a 14 minute mile pace for the first 20 miles. If you don’t you get picked up by the wuss busses and don’t get to finish. To make it even more humiliating, the wuss busses are school busses. After we doubled back we saw the wuss busses driving along the course. It was a little scary seeing them, but then we realized that we were miles in front of them and we were running right on schedule.

This pic isn’t from RCP, but it is one of the wuss busses.