The Beginning of my European Racing Career

Jamie running through the Olympic Stadium. This won't be the last time HE's running on an olympic track.

Look how happy I am!

Everyone after the race. We all finished. We all survived.

Everyone walking down to the start.

Laura hopping of the pre-race jitters.

Jamie's game face, which looks like he just ate a lemon.

They turned on the fountains in Plaza Espanya just for us!

Look at me go! I'm in running in the Olympic stadium, only 10 years too late!

Sorry about the photo captions. I don't quite know how to handle the formatting quite yet. I hope you have fun guessing which caption goes with which photo!

Today I had my first race in Europe. For those of you who've been here before, it was the Corte Ingles run. For those of you who don't know it, it's a free 11k run put on by the biggest (and pretty much only) department store chain in Spain. As far as I can tell, it's free because it's an excuse for Corte Ingles to shut down half the city on a Sunday morning so that 70,000 billboards can run around it for an hour or so. That, and they didn't give t-shirts: cheapskates! And what a motley crew it was! There were those big, tall paper mache statues (I can never remember the name) that are in every Spanish religious festivals, numbers pinned to babies in strollers, numbers taped to dogs, old people, kids of literally ALL ages, and un uncountable number of Barca jerseys. Somehow I convinced one or two poor sods who are unfortunate enough to be my friends to sign up, and they convinced a some more people, so I wound up having 4 companions in the race (unlike most of the races I did at home where I ran - or whatever - alone). There were so many people doing it and no apparent organization at the starting line, so it took a couple of kilometers (about a mile) before you could even really run for more than 5 seconds at a time, but about half an hour into it - we were off! Joolie got lost early, but Ben, Laura, Jamie and I managed to stay together through the first half. We knew that we were going to have to climb part of Montjuic (as the "mont" suggests - a hill), what we didn't know was that we would have to climb it, then go down, then back up 3 times! The most exciting part was the lap that you run around the Olympic track. How many times does THAT happen? We all crossed the finish line within about 10 minutes of eachother and enjoyed our terriffic prizes together - a free warm Coke. All in all it was a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to another fun and full season! If any of you are ever around Barcelona the first Sunday in May, I highly recommend the Corte Ingles run. There's no charity or feel-good feeling, but still it's fun just to see everyone that turns out.