D's Big Race

Well after 9 long months of training, D's marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon, was October 30.  It was so cold that weekend that it actually snowed on Saturday!  The girls and I took the metro in and saw D at mile 17 and again at the finish.  We had to nix seeing him more cause it was COLD as a spectator.

D totally rocked the marathon.  He finished in sub 3 hours - which is HUGE in the running world.  Here are his stats (he is such an engineer!)

Time:                     2:59:04

Pace:                     6:50

Overall Place:     #174 out of 20,895 (top 0.8%)

Gender Place:   #162 out of 12,365 (top 1.3%)

Age Group:         #27 out of 1960 (top 1.4%)

Super impressive, right?

Not sure how long this link will work, but here is a link to his pictures during the race by the professional photographers.  Some of them are super good cause they have such a pretty historical background.  Another advantage to being in the front is that he got a ton of pictures taken of him - harder to do when you are in a huge pack.  Here is the link: http://www.marathonfoto.com/index.cfm?action=site.login&RaceOID=13692011F1&LastName=HADDEN&BibNumber=14929&spMAILINGID=36518508&spUserID=MTE3MTQwMDE1NjcS1&spJOBID=117505760&spREPORTID=MTE3NTA1NzYwS0

If you click the little magnifying glass at the bottom of the picture you can see it better.

Here are the pics that I took:

 Snow in October? Crazy!

 Riding the Metro to go cheer on Daddy!

 Waiting at mile 17 and ringing their little cow bells

 Getting ready to high-five D (in the running tights and grey shirt) at mile 17.  Brooke pulled her hand back right as that guy in front of D tried to high-five her.  So funny!

 D rounding the corner for the last 0.2 miles, uphill, to the finish line

 All of us with Darren after the race was over.

Here are the girls reading the metro map as we headed home.  They were so cute about looking at it and finding which dot we were at and counting how many more dots we had left.