Post-run yesterday, I headed into the 'city centre' and up to Central Park to check out the progress.
The finish line is up, the grandstand seats are installed, the portapotties are out (and, just for the record, Royal Flush Inc is a top quality name for a chemical toilet company). Central Park was looking beautiful, a giant saffron-coloured arena for the big finish of our endurance test. There must have been some sort of junior fun run, as there seemed to be about 80 schools-worth of children and teachers milling about the West Drive, not to mention the usual mass of tourists and prospective marathon runners.
Just seeing the bare finish line was exciting - I tried to visualise a strong finish for Sunday (while trying not to notice the slight uphill climb to the line) but, to be honest, I found it all very emotional. If I'm that weepy just watching them build the finish line, how much am I going to be bawling my eyes out when I cross it on Sunday?
After a nice healthy carbtastic lunch in the Upper West Side, I headed down to the Rockefeller Centre to pick NY from the office so we could head over to the Javits Convention Centre for registration. The expo is massive and the registration process is slick, although I imagine it will be more of a bun fight on Saturday itself.
I now have my race bib, my timing chip and a fantastic free race t-shirt. The t-shirt alone is well worth the price of the flight, and I can't wait to wear it - after the race of course!
The expo itself is a mix of lots of clothes and shoe stores, marketing for other marathons and lots of sports gels and drinks. We did manage to get a few PowerBar freebies, a free Andalucia t-shirt and some lanyards but otherwise it was fairly low on free samples. Probably just as well, as NY and I were hyper enough without an additional sugar rush.
The goody bag is full of weird and wonderful stuff, including a fridge magnet that you adapt to read your finish time and, bizarrely, a sachet of olive oil and sherry vinegar(?). The latter is only packaged in Spanish so I think there is a strong chance that some monolingual Brit is going to neck the contents of the sachet thinking it's some sort of energy gel...
Despite having sworn blind for the last 3 weeks I would never do another marathon, I also managed to enter competitions for places in next year's marathons in Edinburgh, Seville and Sydney! Anything for a free holiday!
And to be honest, this pre-race state is so exciting, it's almost making me change my mind already...
LON
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