How was the trip? Pretty neat...

As you know, I raised money for and trained with the American Stroke Association's Train to End Stroke (TTES) program. We flew out as a group and stayed at the same hotel. Since we were with the group, we didn't rent a car and had to rely on shuttle services that TTES had arranged for us.

So, we flew out of Houston at, like, the crack of dawn on Friday, January 7. We got to Phoenix and our shuttle took us to our hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel rooms weren't going to be ready for like four or five hours. But, our industrious coach, Bobby, found a friend who could drive us to the Marathon Expo in his van (ominous music goes here). We were sooo appreciative of the ride, but it really was comical. There were 10+ grown adults in the back this van that had no seats. We were laughing the whole half hour trip!

So, we went to the Expo and got our race packets. If you've never been to one of these things, they are way cool! We picked up our race packets (my bib number was 9114!) and our timing chips, then proceeded to look around. There are always tons of vendors selling stuff. I realized that I had not brought anything that was warm to wear before the race, so I bought a neat dry-weave T-shirt that says "Runners Rock." I love it! After the Expo, we headed back to the hotel. We were wiped out! We walked to an Italian restaurant for dinner that night and then pretty much did nothing.

Saturday morning, we got up for a training run. We only did two miles, but it was nice to get acclimated to the air (so much less humidity than south Texas!) and the temperature (perfect!). After the training run, we pretty much did nothing again all day. We walked to the mall to eat lunch (Ruby Tuesday's has a great menu for those watching your diet), but didn't do any shopping because we wanted to save our feet for race day.

Saturday night, we headed over to the TTES Pasta Party, which was at a beautiful hotel that was somewhere in Phoenix (since I wasn't driving, I have no clue where anything was the whole weekend). The pasta was decent and the crowd was HUGE!!! TTES had 850 runners participating! The Stroke Hero who spoke was a man named Ray who suffered from a stroke in 1994. He is a supporter of the TTES program and completed a full marathon in 2001. He was very funny! After the Pasta Party, we headed back to the hotel to (try to) go to sleep. Remember when you were a kid and you were so excited about something (like family vacation or the first day of the school year) that you couldn't sleep? Well, that's how I felt. Very antsy. I finally fell asleep around 11:00 and we got up at 4:30. We set three different alarms to wake us up...and they did their job!

So, we got up, got ready, and went to our Coach's room for breakfast (I had a banana, in case you were curious), then headed out to the shuttle to the race (see "How was the race? Fantastic!" for race details).

After the race, we lounged around the hotel, then headed back to the other hotel for our Victory Party. By this time, though, I was worn out and got on the first shuttle back to our hotel.

Monday, our flight wasn't until 4:30, so we pretty much did nothing around the hotel (are you detecting a theme?) until it was time to pack up and head to the airport. Then, back to the real world!