A Tale of Two Halves: Running In The Mississippi Heat

The 46 hour journey of a 50 State Marathoner is pretty awesome and exhausting. Our journey began at 3am Saturday morning when we woke up and got ready to go to the airport for a 6am flight to Charlotte, NC. Little did we know that the flight would be delayed by an hour due to a maintenance issue and we would subsequently miss our connection by mere minutes. It was frustrating but thankfully there was another flight to Gulfport, MS later in the day. Um, MUCH later in the day. Like 7 hours later to be exact. So we had some serious time to kill in the Charlotte airport. We started off by carbing up with a big breakfast (pancakes and sausage) at Whiskey River. I ate EVERYTHING. I was starving and so was Pat and then we proceeded to walk around to every freaking terminal and check it all out. What I loved was the airport is so big and they also have a therapy dog that we proceeded to meet and pet of course. We sat in the rocking chairs and tried to rest as much as possible. I couldn’t nap but Pat could. We filled up our water bottles as much as possible and drank often so that we would be completely hydrated. God knows we had plenty of TIME to fill up our bladders and visit the bathroom about 23 times over the course of 7 hours. It was kind of a boring and uneventful day but at least we were together. This day reminded me of my long layovers in the Portland, Oregon airport in June 2018 when I was alone, so at least I could talk to Pat in-person this time. The hours passed and we eventually got on our flight to Gulfport. Once we landed in Gulfport, we found out that our prepaid rental car was “given away” because we didn’t show up at 10:30am. OK great. We just wanted to get to the hotel at this point. Thankfully, an Uber driver was literally 2 minutes away and we got there quicker than if we actually got in that rental car. She was nice and entertaining and the ride was actually cheaper than a rental car. We had enough time to get to our hotel room, lay out our things for race day and hunker down for the night and try to get some quality sleep. Thankfully, one of our runner friends was also there and she was so kind to pick up our bibs for us as we were staying in the same hotel. She saved us time on Sunday morning and was probably glad she wasn’t flying our airline!! At least she made it there on time! I wished we were on her flight too. We had already eaten dinner at the airport (not ideal) but we intentionally did so that we would save time once we got to Biloxi. We knew by then we would be spent from the long day of travel and just want to get organized and go to sleep as soon as possible. Once we got to the hotel though, Pat proceeded to call the rental car company and demand our money back – so add that to an already exhausting day. But the important thing was that we made it to Mississippi and we were going to run this race. It’s always good to have a travel contingency plan. I mean if there was no other way to get us to Gulfport that day, we would have driven 8-9 hours from Charlotte. Thankfully we did NOT have to do that, but that was a last resort if needed. We went to sleep around 8:30pm. Since arriving at the hotel around 6:15pm, it pretty much took that long until we unpacked, ate the warm Doubletree cookies (why not, we were just going to burn it off tomorrow), set everything up, talked to our friend, bitched at the rental car company, brushed our teeth and got ready for bed. We even forgot to initially ask for late checkout so we called the front desk and only got an additional half hour so we spent some time re-packing as much as we could to save us time after the race when we would feel like shit and could barely move. LOL! And there we have it! That brought us to about 8:30pm when our heads hit the pillows. My Garmin says I was asleep by 8:51pm and wake up time was 3:14am. Not bad, I will always take 6 hours of solid sleep just before a marathon. My alarm wasn’t set until 3:45, but I always wake up before the alarm. Always. Pat and I jumped out of bed and since it would be fairly warm out, we took showers before the race. I don’t always especially if it’s going to be very cold out. We were up and out of our hotel room by 4:15am and made the trek to the shuttle buses which were less than a half mile away. While sitting on the bus, we met some nice marathoners from other parts of the country and we traded stories and just talked about running and races and all of that fun stuff. We had to drive 24 miles out to the start line and it was a chilly morning although the weather app said it was 54 degrees but there was a little breeze in the air. We used the porta potty but then jumped back on the bus to stay warm and continued talking with others. I love the comradery. It’s awesome and I love that we all love the same thing. Us marathoners, going the distance. Gutting it out. It’s an incredible journey. LFG. An hour later, we made one more pit stop to the bathroom before the start. It’s always good to go 10-15 minutes before the start so that I don’t have to stop during the race. As we walked to the start line, the sun popped up over the horizon and OMG was it beautiful. I have never started a marathon with views like this. It was incredible. I was so worried that once that sun came up, it would get so hot later on but for right now, I enjoyed seeing it appear. I made Pat take a few pictures since he wasn’t using his phone for music and I was trying to conserve my battery. LOL. As we lined up at the start, I gave him a kiss and we both said “Good luck”. I knew the bugger would end up flying past me, but ok, say “Good luck” for now. The race started and I was freaking flying. My Garmin said I was running a 7:25 pace and I felt incredible. It was awesome! I didn’t even feel like I was trying. Pure adrenaline baby. As I crossed the mile 1 marker, my watch said 7:41. I was happy with that. I felt really good and that sun was still very low in the sky. As the next few miles progressed, I hit mile 2 at 8:05 and mile 3 at 8:12. Slipping a little bit – LOL! The sun was rising now and I was wishing it to