Wedding and 2013 Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon Expo

A Wedding…

Friday morning was my normal long, slow 45 minutes swim. I was feeling pretty good and happy that my ear was feeling better, so I threw in an extra 250 meters for good measure. One of my wife’s cousins was getting married that evening, so I rushed home after work to get dressed and head over to Lake Nockamixon where the wedding was at.

The wedding was at the Lake House Inn on the far side of the lake(from Quakertown). The place was really beautiful and the reception “bubble” hall had all glass windows on the lake side, which was pretty spectacular as the sun went down. It was a gorgeous day too. I can’t believe I didn’t take a picture of it! It was a really nice affair and I think my favorite thing was my placecard. I guess I was the only “vegan” at the wedding. My wifes’ cousin said I threw them for a loop. I ended up getting a nice chuck of baked tofu and extra veggies and potatoes which was fine.

St. Luke’s Lehigh Valley Half Marathon Expo

On Saturday, we headed over to the LV Half Marathon Expo for our bib pickup. It was at the Holiday Inn in downtown Allentown which is always an adventure since we don’t get down there too often. My wife wanted to check out a seminar at 11am so we were trying to get there by then. The seminar we attended was the “Because I Can” seminar by Janet Oberholtzer. Janet had been in a serious accident several years ago and suffered serious injury to her legs and was told she could not walk again. Now she is running marathons. She ran in the D&L Marathon last November that I had run. I was actually wondering if she had a better time than I did…fortunately she didn’t. Whew! Pretty impressive and motivating story worth checking out.

After that we headed over to the expo and picked up our bibs and swag. Swag was pretty lame actually. Technical shirt was nice and in my favorite color green. Other than that we just got a re-usable shopping bag. One good thing was there was no advertisements either. I ended up find a 4-bottle FuelBelt for Ironman and some spare bottles for my run special needs bag. My wife spotted some running “skort” she had to have which is a combination of a skirt and shorts. It’s all about looking good I guess. To her credit she had bought some cheapo one at Target that was causing some chaffing issues. I bumped into some work friends that were running and Chris from the Emmaus Run Inn(formerly The Finish Line Running Store) and chatted a bit. We were going to hit the Allentown Brew Works for some lunch, but changed plans due to how late it was. Instead we opted for Wegman’s buffet. I still had a ~3 hour bike ride to do and it was past noon already.

Bike Ride – Category 3 on Sweetwood Drive

Next up was my long bike ride of the week. My coach put a 2:00 ride on my schedule but said if I felt up to it I could do 2:30-2:45. I felt the need to go one better and do a 3:00 ride instead. Running a half-marathon the next day is not going to keep me down. Not only did I do a long ride, but I finally hit the Category 3 climb on Sweetwood Drive out of Macungie that I had been eager to try for some time. The ride did not disappoint and it went on and on with varying degrees of gradient the whole 3.2 miles. Good warm-up for the legs. After that I pretty much kept it on the rollers the rest of the ride. There was a slight breeze that day but nothing that would make much of a difference really.

After my ride, I put on my compression socks, made some dinner and relaxed a bit for tomorrow’s half-marathon.