State 30 Arizona

The Lost Dutchman Marathon is in Apache Junction Arizona which is in the Phoenix area. It is a Great Race. Small, Well Organized, and a Scenic course. Cowtown in Ft Worth was the weekend after Lost Dutchman and I was able to get the week off to do them both. There was another much Larger Marathon the same day in the Phoenix area. It was the IMS Marathon in Glendale, it may have been good, but it would have been hard to Top Lost Dutchman.

This was another driving trip. I keep thinking that I have driven to all the states I can and the rest will be via Air Plane, but some how I keep finding myself driving. The GPS showed a 16 hour drive to Phoenix. We left Friday night after I got off work and drove straight through. We manged to turn the 16 hours into 20.5 and just made it to the expo 20 minutes before they closed. (There was NO packet pickup race morning).

The race weather was again optimal. The course was very scenic and had a feww rolling hills. There were quite a few onlookers along the course, as it ran through several neighborhooods. We left the Sports Complex in Apache Junction and ran an Out and Back toward Superstition Mountain. It was actually the last 6.5 of the marathon course.

My Girlfriend went with me, and she has got to be the Greatest Roadie/Equipment Manager/Cheerleader in the World. She is awesome. Any way she is also a Teacher, and had a visiting "Flat Stanley" from Oklahoma. (Flat Stanley is a civics project, where someone  will send a Paper Character named Flat Stanley to some one else. Who ever Flat Stanley is visiting will carry him along on their daily routine, and take pictures of him to  document his adventures) I had never heard of him either, but he has been around since the 60's. Well Stanley made the trip to Arizona with us and I decided to tale him on the run with me. We pinned him into my race belt and he made it the entire course. Richelle even made him his own Bib and Finisher's Medal. While I was running with him, I had a lot of comments about him. It was pretty much equal between people who recognized him and those who had no Idea who he was.

After the race, I had to drop Richelle off at the airport so she could be at work the next day. I took my time driving back, stopping to see the Grand Canyon on Monday, and spent the night at my Mom's in Graham Texas on Tuesday. When I got back home Wednesday afternoon, I had driven 2944 miles in 5 days. I had Thursday off, and then Richelle went back to Ft Worth on Friday for Cowtown.

State 29 New Mexico

State 29 was New Mexico. It was a Spur of the Moment trip. My friends Liz and Henk Roelant who live in Las Cruces New Mexico invited me to come out and do the Half Marathon there. My girlfriend and I drove and we left on Saturday morning. I had to work and we left at 10:30 when I got off. It was a long drive and we got to Las Cruces about 1:00 on Sunday morning. Liz and Henk were able to get my packet so all I had to do was get up and run at 7:00. Simple enough huh? Well, as it seems with most of my events , it wasn't that easy.I didn't sleep real well during the drive in the car, and only about 4.5 hours at Liz's. Las Cruces is at about 4000 ft so I wasn't used to the elevation either. This was a "Just get it In" run. The weather was perfect for it and the course was a fairly Flat Out and Back. It was a very small race and as such there was not a lot of spectators out that morning. We didn't stay in Las Cruces long. We left after shortly after the race and got to see the White Sands Missile area which is just North of Las Cruces.