Sunday morning the forecast did not look good.
It was going to be a wet marathon. M decided to wear a garbage bag to try and keep his core as warm as possible but he knew he was going to get wet - very wet.
M took the shuttle to the marathon start. We had decided that if it was raining that I'd leave the boys at the hotel with Grandma and I would brave the rain to try and meet him at mile 20 and the finish line. At breakfast I looked out the window and saw that it was pouring. Plus it was cold and windy. The weather was awful. I logged on to CIM's website to see M's time after 5.9 miles and noticed he was running 7:20 miles which was faster than his last marathon at this point and faster than the time he told me.
The CIM athlete tracker website then went down so I couldn't see his time at the halfway point. I figured he probably would have slowed down a bit so I knew if I got to the 20 mile point by 9:25am I should catch him easily. The drive there took awhile. Four lanes of the freeway were flooded. The streets were filled with water and it was raining so hard. Thankfully I found the race and parked at 9:20am. I spent 5 minutes in the car trying to load the site to see if it was back up, calling my father-in-law to have him check, before just getting out to see if I could see M. I was about 50 feet from the 20 mile marker. Even with an umbrella, rain jacket, and boots I still got wet pretty quickly. I felt even more sorry for M. How he and all of those other runners were running in this weather was beyond me.
I cheered on the runners (who all looked pretty miserable) hoping to see M. At 9:40 I checked the website one last time only to see that he passed through mile 20 at 9:24. I was there but still in the car. I missed him! I felt awful. I knew he probably could have used some encouragement. I also realized that he was still running pretty fast which meant I had about 30 minutes to make it to the finish line.
I ran back to my car and drove as fast as I safely could to the finish. Streets were still flooded so it was slow moving. I kept watching the minutes tick away and was sick to my stomach that I was going to miss him. Once I got in the general area of the finish line I parked (which I realized once I got out was a passenger loading zone only). It was 10:01. I ran as fast as I could, praying I wouldn't miss him.
Once I saw the runners I just stopped there. I was right in front of the mile 26 marker. Barely 30 seconds later of my stopping I saw M run by. He looked miserable but still running strong. He finished in 3:11:45 shaving 16 minutes off his PR in Half Moon Bay in September. Simply amazing.
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