How I Started 2014

2014 officially kicked into gear when I got up at 3:30 am and ran a total of 14.5 miles, mostly along the Rose Parade Route. In short, it was like running in a highly guarded third world country with a huge population density of homeless people sleeping in the gutter who are rich enough to afford nice sleeping bags and cots and a seemingly endless supply of tortillas to throw.

All humor aside, it was pretty cool. I have always said that running marathons offers a unique opportunity to safely run the streets of a city and experience what many feel to be the highlights of what the town has to offer. This was kind of like that, but the people gathered at the sidewalk couldn't care less about the people running down the street. In fact, some of them were in a deep slumber and clearly didn't want to be bothered. They weren't there to encourage or celebrate running. That's ok though, because the point of it all was to see the Rose Parade! Running the route in the early am hours before the start of the parade offered a unique behind the scenes look.

The group I ran with was about 50 in numbers, and I only knew a few of them. This was fine though, as there's no way to keep that large of a group with varying abilities together. We all kind of spread out rather quickly. Once we got to the end of our run (which was the start of the parade) we got to sneak an up close look at all of the floats as they were staged and ready to roll. I have never seen the floats so close and in such detail, except for that one time in high school when I volunteered to glue silver leaf onto the top of the Long Beach float. But that was ages ago and I had only seen the float sans-flowers. Those are applied last as their vibrant shelf-life is relatively miniscule. Anyways… seeing these massive works of art up close was so neat!

After seeing all the floats and doing some cool things like: watching KC and the Sunshine band practice, getting an up close view of the majestic Budweiser Clydesdale horses, and taking a picture with some dudes dressed up like a bunch of grapes, back along the route we ran.

I then promptly took a miniature coma-style nap.

Happy 2014!