Did I get your attention? That pretty much sums up my weekend at the Chicago Marathon a couple weekends ago. I went along with Ryan and Julie as Ryan was running. It was his 6th marathon. We arrived in Chicago around 10:30pm on Friday night and has just gotten settled in our hotel downtown when we heard sirens. We quickly realized that there were 5 or 6 fire trucks and police cars stopped at our hotel. Then we heard the announcement..."This is the Chicago Fire Department. The fire has been extinguished. We will be returning control of the hotel over to hotel management shortly. Please remain in your rooms." That was the gist of the announcement that we heard. And AFTER this announcement the fire alarm went off. We were like...do we leave? do we stay? we were comfortable so we stayed. I roamed the halls a bit because I was trying to get a better view of the fire trucks below and the window in our room was blocked by an awning. Exciting night.
Saturday we spent the day watching the Iowa game on TV with some friends of their in the area and then later that afternoon we headed to pick up Ryan's race packet. We spent some time walking around the booths that were set up there looking at running shoes and running clothes and all things "running". Julie and I even tried a "cube of energy" that was the nastiest thing I have ever eaten! We affectionally dubbed it our "jello shot". It was literally in the shape of a cube and the texture was sort of gummy bear but stickier (and worse) and the worst part about it was that it was cola flavored! I determined after eating this that only cola should be cola flavored...
That night Ryan wanted to veg and watch football on TV and Julie and I didn't so we headed out for a "date". We both had headaches and were starving so we set off in search of somewhere to eat. We went to two places that each had a wait of an hour and we didn't want to wait that long so we decided to just go to a movie and get popcorn. The only movie that we were in time for was "Fireproof" so we bought tickets and then discovered the concession stand had hot dogs and nachos so we got that to eat. We hadn't been in the movie long when I could tell Julie wasn't feeling feel. I kept asking her if she wanted to go and she kept saying "no, I'm alright". I knew she wasn't but she can be stubborn sometimes. (Love you, Jules!) Let me interject here that before we set off on our quest for food we stopped in at Walgreens to get some cold medicine...and they put it in a bag. This turned out to be the best decision we made that evening because after a short time into the movie Julie was puking into said bag! Needless to say, we left the movie.
The next morning was the marathon. We had 3 or 4 pre-arranged spots where we were going to try and see Ryan but we only ended up seeing him at the very beginning and at the very end. He ran faster than he anticipated and we missed him at the other 2 spots. Long story short here...he cramped up and once he crossed the finish line had to go to the medical tent. He was there for 2 hours so I left Julie there with him while I went to check us out of the hotel. I booked it 17 blocks through downtown Chicago, got us checked out, got all out bags and stuff to the car and got back to pick them up and we headed out of town. We hadn't been on the road more than 30 minutes when Ryan was also puking into a plastic bag. Wow...I started to get a complex!
All in all it was a very interesting, and very fun, weekend! I can't wait to spend a week with them at Disney World in November! What more can they throw at me? :-) I have pictures (none of the puking) but don't have them uploaded yet. Stay tuned for that...
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