Cherry Blossom 10 miler!!

April 1st, some of my running buddies (BLG) and I all got into a car and drove to DC. What for? CHERRY BLOSSOM TEN MILER! OK, so why the excitement? First of all, I'm always excited to run with my friends. Second, DC is probably my favorite city in the US (to date). As my friend pointed out, it is a nerd city... hello! Nerd here!!! So yeah. This is a lottery race, which means you have to enter a lottery because so many people want to run it. We heard that if you signed up as a group there were higher chances of getting in so my friends and I joined a group (from a friend's friend) and besides, if we were gonna do it, better to do it all together or not at all. So last December we got an email that we were in. We decided to run it together, for fun without any stress.

We arrived Saturday around 1pm. The hotel allowed us to check in early. This was the race's hotel and so they were great about having welcome signs for the runners, water, white boards and markers for people to make signs, bananas, cow bells, etc. I thought that was really thoughtful and created a great environment for us runners. We walked to pick up our packets. I was really, really excited about the expo, hoping to buy some goodies. Unfortunately, it wasn't what I expected. It was kind of small which was a disappointment given the size of the race. But whatever. After this we walked to the mall and found some food trucks on the way!!!! OMG I love food! so this was awesome, and also some ice cream. Ice cream counts as carb loading right? We had dinner at this awesome Italian restaurant which name I don't remember... oops.

So race day... we walked leisurely to the race since we were in the last corral and were just planning to enjoy the race. The weather was beautiful, the course was also great, with lots of cherry blossoms (what was left of them), and since we were taking it easy, we even stopped a couple of times for photos and we chatted the whole way. Also, it was great not to race it cause it's so crowded that it would be a very challenging race to PR just because of that. That said, a couple of runners we met that weekend did PR it, so there's that! It took us about 2 h to finish which considering the slow pace and stops, it was actually pretty good. Took a few photos, went back to the hotel, took showers and then headed out. We decided to get out of the city before looking for food, so we drove up to Frederick for food and we were not disappointed... again, I forget the name oops. My friend Becca might have that info in her blog (If you like to follow runners blogs, you should definitely check hers).

Overall, one of my favorite races ever in one of my favorite cities.