The Expo

My marathon experience first began with the Health and Fitness Expo. You must go to the Expo to pickup your race packet, goodie bag and T-shirt or you cannot run in the race. Essentially they force you to come to the expo to try and entice you into buying their souvenirs or buying items from the race exhibitors. This seems to be a successful tactic as they got me to so both. I purchased a RNR San Antonio tech shirt, bought a book, and some shot blocks that I needed for the race the next day. The expo was fairly crowded, but did pick up some good samples from Cytomax. Gill was not impressed with the medals that most of the races at the expo were displaying as the medal from the Detroit Marathon was much better that all of the others.

While there we had the opportunity to meet with Marathon Chris at the expo. Chris has the blog and podcast called Running Adventures in an Extraordinary World. It was neat meeting a podcaster that you have listened. After getting to know them in cyberspace, by listening to their podcasts and reading their blogs, it was nice to talk in person. I see that she has already posted several items on her blog about the race so be sure to check that out also. Here is a picture of me with Maraton Chris.


While we were at the Expo we listed to several of the speakers that were putting on the clinics. Several were pretty funny and they were also interesting. The people that we heard were John Bingham, a Runners World journalist that run's mararthon's in the back of the pack, The Hansons, which is a Detroit, MI area elite running team, and Bart Yasso, a Runner's World journalist that has run in a lot of extreme events. Bart was also at the Expo autographing his book about his running life. After listening to him talk it sounded like his book would be interesting. The photo below is of Bart Yasso(on the right)

We skipped the pre-race pasta party to have a pasta party at my house as my wife was making a really good baked spaghetti dish to load us up with carbs for the next day. This was a much better idea for me as I knew that if I went to the pasta party I would have eaten a lot more that I should have.

Next I will be talking about arriving at the race and the race start.

Chad