Seattle (Half) Marathon

I am further cementing my status as a Run-groupie. Remember this post? Well this time it was the Seattle Marathon...Bret, his mom, sister Sara, and cousin's girlfriend Anna ran/walked the half-marathon. They all did great! Gabe joined us ex-utero for this outing, and I talked Christina into coming along to keep me company while Bret was running. A HUGE thank you to Christina, without whom trekking around by myself with Gabe would have been a lot harder, and not nearly as fun!

Speaking of Christina...remember this post (wow there's a lot of flashbacks to previous posts today!), where I lamented that Christina rarely does a normal picture smile? Well Bret's sister Sara is the same!

So I got a picture of the two hams together. Can you even stand how adorable these two are??

After the runners departed, Christina and I began a madcap race against time to try to find a spot along the route to cheer them on. We ended up in Madison Park, not sure if they'd passed by yet or not.

(yes that was a totally self-serving picture insertion because I love the expression on Gabe's face as he's looking up at me!)

You may recall my less than stellar camera work as a groupie for the 5k Run. Well this time we saw Sara, but didn't have the camera ready, so we only got Sara's back:

And this time we saw more than Bret's elbow, but we were talking to people next to us and didn't have the camera ready, so we only got Bret's back:
[Ok. Side note. This is ridiculous. I started this post 7 days ago but got stymied because I couldn't remember how I drew the arrow pointing to Bret's elbow in the 5k Run post. So then I got Adobe Photoshop Elements because I wanted a better photo editing program and there was a coupon for it in the Costco mailer. But I've just spent the past hour, that's right I said HOUR, trying to figure out how to do the arrow in Elements, with all the layers and craziness, and the ones I did pointing to Sara's back and Bret's back are wack-a-doo different! All I wanted to do was draw a simple arrow... SHEESH!]

Anyway - Bret had to yell "Totten!" four times, he told me later, to get my attention as he was running by. In my defense, the woman I was chatting with had a little baby two weeks older than Gabe - need I say more?

Well I decided I wasn't going out like that, and Christina encouraged me that we had time to find another spot along the marathon route to catch Bret before the end of the run in Memorial Stadium. We ran back to the car as we calculated how much was left of the route, Bret's speed, how long it would take us to get to the spot we had in mind...and we got there mere moments before Bret came by! WAHOO! So we got to see him, visit for a minute while he took a breather, and provide some encouragement for his last 2 miles.

Then we were off to Memorial Stadium to the finish line. Christina was photographer extraordinaire the whole day - and after Bret passed us upon entering the Stadium, Christina dashed down to the finish line to get pictures of Bret crossing it and accepting his finisher's medal.

We're proud of you Babe!!

And look, they're all still smiling even after the run!