Beach to Bay 2014: Bizarre and then some.

This past weekend I ran the Beach to Bay relay marathon for the 4th time in the 5 years we've lived in south Texas. Here in Corpus Christi, it's a pretty big deal. It's supposedly the largest relay marathon in the nation and this year, they sold out at a capped off 2,500 teams. It's always a lot of fun and can be easy-breezy or it can be brutal all based on the weather. Mid-May in coastal Texas hasn't always been kind to runners-kind of like 2 years ago (I ran leg #3 while pregnant) when over 1,000 runners needed medical attention due to the heat. The temps this year were pretty mild, but the wind was ridiculous.  Thankfully I was not running into the wind for the majority of my leg. Unfortunately, I still can't really say that I was all that pleased with my run and finishing time. It was just one of those off days.

This year, I ran leg 2 which goes from the beach at Padre Island to the bridge that connects Padre Island to Flour Bluff, (according to my Nike app that amounted to about 4.75 miles). Being that the traffic on the island is literally at a standstill for HOURS before and after the race, I chose to ride a shuttle bus to the start of my leg. Convenient, right?

Howabout my bus got in a wreck on the bridge.

Post-wreck. Sitting around waiting for police & another bus. 

Like a slam-on-the-brakes-fishtail-then-rear-end-the-car-in-front kind of wreck. Remember how I mentioned just a second ago that traffic is terrible the morning of the race? Apparently, cars were at a standstill, but the bus couldn't stop quite fast enough to avoid bashing in a car ahead of us. Thankfully nobody on the bus was injured, and I don't think the other car had injuries. We were all a little bewildered by the event. Sadly, my breakfast flew out of my lap and landed somewhere else on the bus that I never ended up finding... which really sucks when you've eaten nearly nothing else and need to run a race. I had to give my contact information to a police officer and we all sat around and waited about an hour for a replacement bus to take us the rest of the way. I made it to my leg just after the race started. Thank goodness I wasn't running the first leg.

So if that wasn't strange enough, I nearly got barfed on while I was waiting in the chute for my first leg teammate. Apparently some guy didn't quite train well enough for the 3 mile run along the beach. C'mon Man! Also, not what I wanted to see just prior to takeoff. My mirror neurons were firing off and before too long, I was also feeling some sympathy nausea.

And if you still aren't convinced of my race day's bizarreness, I caught a proposal going into the chute between legs 2 and 3. I'm running around the corner about to hand off to my next teammate and see this large group of people dressed alike, a sign saying "Marry Me," and a guy down on one knee holding a ring out to a female runner. I cheered for them as I thought, there's no way I'd want to be proposed to when I'm sweaty, stinky, and out of breath. I assume she said yes.

Yay! All done!! (you can see leg #3 runners on the bridge behind me.)

I didn't realize that two of my coworkers were also running leg #2 until we spotted each other all standing around after finishing. Luckily, we were able to carpool back to the shuttle point and I didn't have to chance another bus incident.

Needless to say, I was thankful to be back in the comfort of my own car driving home.