Rock n Roll Las Vegas Marathon (My First Marathon): Part I

I'm still a little bit amazed that my first marathon is actually finished. After putting in months of training, the day has finally passed...and I made it to the finish line!

Let me start from the beginning...

We arrived in Las Vegas late Friday night, and just went to our hotel to meet up with the friends we were staying with. We ended up staying up pretty late just talking / catching up -- they live in CT, so we don't see them very often!

On Saturday, we headed to the expo. It was held in the Convention Center near the Venetian. I was hoping we wouldn't have to walk too much, but it is hard to get anywhere on the Strip in Vegas without walking, or paying a ton for a cab.


The expo was gigantic! The check-in process went really smoothly, and we didn't have any issues getting our bibs or t-shirts. Afterward we wandered around to check out some of the vendors since we had never been to an expo like that before. We didn't buy anything, but it was cool to see what was out there.

For the rest of the day, we wandered the Strip (a few friends had never been there before, so it was fun to see their reaction to all the huge casinos and lights). We got tickets to David Copperfield's show, so we slowly made our way down to the MGM. On the way we checked out the street performers, ate an early dinner at Toby Keith's I love This Bar, and bought a bunch of treats at the M&M store! We ended up walking way more than I wanted to (probably almost 6 miles on the day), but at least it was spread out over the day.

After the David Copperfield show (which was pretty cool by the way...better than I expected), we cabbed back to our hotel and all shared a small pizza as a late night snack. We decided to go to bed a little later than we usually would for a morning race since this run didn't start until 3pm.

Sunday morning was spent lounging in our room. We slept in until about 10, then stretched and ate before getting ready. We decided to cab to the start of the race since our hotel's shuttle put us about 3 miles from the starting line. We got there super early, so we found a spot inside to hide from the crazy winds until closer to race time.

About 2 o'clock, we headed to the start area to check our bags and get into our corrals. Before I knew it, the race was about to start!

Overall I felt surprisingly calm all day. Earlier in the week I figured I was going to be nervous all day about the run, but I really wasn't to bad. I believed I would be able to make it, and tried to stay confident. The thing that made me the most worried was the wind. It had been beautiful on Saturday, so I hadn't expected the wind -- and I know how hard a windy run can be!

Stay tuned for more about the race!