Marine Corps Marathon 2014 Part 1

Friday afternoon after class I flew to DC with my friend Meg for the Marine Corps Marathon. Meg had originally planned to run the marathon with me as her first (she got in via the lottery) but got injured over the summer and couldn’t run the full marathon, so she opted to run the 10K instead. We were ready for a fun race weekend in DC!

Saturday morning after an awesome breakfast buffet at our hotel in Alexandria, we rode the metro to the race expo in DC. Our metro stop was right across from our hotel and that was magnificent. There was a huge line to get into the expo as soon as we stepped out of the metro station. The expo was gigantic and the most amazing race expo I have ever been to.

We spent about 2 hours wandering around and looking at everything, watching the Marine Corps Band and even getting our photos taken with some cute marines. 😉

Thanks, for your service, Marines!

We picked up our race bibs and shirts (they were fleece-lined mock turtlenecks!) and got some official race merch as well. Brooks had an entire store there full of MCM gear. It was quite awesome. I also picked up my shirt from the charity team I was running for, Team Azalea. I decided this would be my race-day shirt, along with a star spangled headband I got at there, too.

We spent the rest of the day exploring DC near the National Mall and the Washington Monument.

We went to dinner Saturday night at a pizza place in Alexandria, Pizza Paradiso. It was a short shuttle ride from the hotel. We also walked around the area a little bit to check things out since neither one of us had ever been here before!