Indy mini-marathon

Today we went to Indianapolis where son Isaac and 'the girlfriend' Laura ran in the OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon. Wowza, I was not expecting this kind of crowd. Apparently 90,000 people show up for this thing. The picture at right doesn't do justice to how many were collected in the Rest & Recovery Area. Actually, the race was still going on when I snapped this pic, and there were literally people all over the west side of downtown Indy. [click on photo's to enlarge]

It was a beautiful day for the festivities too, after a stormy day on Friday and with clouds rolling in this afternoon. We didn't make it for the start - which was at 7:30 am!!! We were there before Isaac and Laura finished though. We would have been there a bit sooner too, but I lost my sense of direction (which is so unlike me). We couldn't come into town the way we normally do because roads were closed for the race, so we found a parking garage that only charged $5. For some reason I had the map backwards and we walked five blocks the wrong direction. It turns out we were parked only 1 block from the finish line. Oops. It was nice when we left though.

I thought Isaac & Laura did extremely well, especially since it was their first mini (which is 13 miles, btw). They ran together and finished in 1 hour and 53 minutes. Smokin'. Laura got 5,151st place and Isaac got 5,154th place (not sure who was between them), but that's pretty darn good considering there were 35,000 runners. This is a pic of the two of them talking to Jane after we finally found one another under the "H." I think we were as winded from walking downtown as they were from running the race. We saw a few people that looked pretty rough though.

I snapped this pic of the canal that runs downtown as we were leaving (along Ohio St.). I have been to Indy quite a number of times and never even knew this place existed. It was pretty cool. All in all a pretty nice day too. I thought about running on the treadmill while we were driving home, but... you know... I've got some work to do first. We'll see.

Peace out; and in.