The Country Music Marathon!

Two weekends ago, Rusty and I drove down to Nashville to meet up with my parents and brother. My dad, brother and Rusty had planned to run the Country Music Half-Marathon on Saturday. We met up at the convention center in Nashville where we registered for the race and got tons of free things from the many, many vendors sponsoring the event.
Here we are at the Convention Center getting psyched for the big race! By 'we', I mean J, Rusty and my dad. My mom and I decided to just sleep in a bit, pack up the hotel rooms and leisurely make our way down to the last mile of the track. Well, I guess we were pretty psyched too! Over 30,000 runners signed up for the big race. The runners were staggered to begin the race. Rusty said that they were still very, very crowded. He said there was about 5 minutes of running where the three of them could run 3 abreast. The rest of the time, they were starting, stopping and zig-zagging around other runners.

J finished just a few minutes in front of Rusty and Daddy...They ran almost the whole way together, but J had a little bit more energy near the end. He is right in the middle of this picture...tall, red shirt, blue shorts :)

Here are Rusty and my dad. They stopped by to grab some water from us and for a photo-shoot! What considerate runners!

They wanted to finish in 2h17mins and ended up finishing at 2h28mins. It was only 11 minutes off of their goal time! Very impressive!! And, we were able to rush back to the hotel and they got showers before the 11AM check-out time...even more impressive! So, there you have it: our adventure in Nashville!