Steamtown Marathon Part Deux

I’ve had some time to reflect on the events from this past Sunday and wanted to produce a list of pros and cons from my first Steamtown Marathon Experience.

Pros:
 Pre-race notifications were great, although I had to find them first(find the asst race director’s twitter page and click on the link to the newsletter.
 Website tracked weekly entries until the race was sold out.
 Lots of options for hotels and restaurants in the area that were not $200/night
 Held a pre-race meeting at the expo talking about the course
 Race morning there were tons of busses ready to heard everyone 45 min to the start line
 Forrest City Middle School was well organized. We had a guy with a sign saying “Follow me”, cheerleaders screaming cheers and handing out water.
 There were plenty of volunteers and water stops along the way, even random water stops
 At almost every water stop there were 2-3 port-o-pots (I’m a guy, I pee in the woods)
 They had plenty of photographers along the course and even after the finish line
 They gave us a plastic bag to put our food in.
 They had showers for us at a local college

Cons:
 Stupid Mother Nature made it 30 degrees at the start.
 The expo was lacking in merchandise to sell.
 The goodie bag included one crappy pair of really small orange sunglasses from an eye doctor, and lots of junk paper.
 The start line wasn’t spaced out enough, took almost a minute to cross the start.
 I didn’t know your ‘official time’ is clock time, not chip time.
 There were no energy gels on the course, just apples and oranges (and gummy bears that I only noticed after I passed them) Good thing I bought some gels at the expo
 I found my new best friend/running partner Tim’s name but could not find him on Facebook to thank him.

I found some pictures also! http://www.runphotos.com/browse.cfm?race_id=192&bib_number=665&searchword=&subFind=Find+Photos

My legs have been pretty beat up these last few days but I went out last night and did a real easy 3 miles. The first mile was slow, and downhill. I felt like my dad running. (limping mostly) Then the road flattened out and went slightly uphill and I could pick up the pace and work out some of that lactic acid and I actually felt pretty good at the end.