Marine Corps Half Marathon

Jesse participated in his first half marathon this past weekend in Fredericksburg, VA! We drove up Friday night to hang out with Leta & Jay, relax, and ate lots of carbs on Saturday. :) Jesse, Leta and I rolled out of bed at 5:30 Sunday morning and headed towards the race. There were A LOT of people and parking was tricky, so Jesse jumped out 1/2 mile away from the start (the closest we could get)and planned on meeting him before the race started at 7:00am. At about 6:50am we were still a half mile from where we wanted to meet him. Leta took off running to find him and I waited at the starting line. About 2 minutes before the gun went off, they found me, and Jesse got into place. I could tell he was frazzled, with very little time to stretch, which didn't help his nerves. Oh, and it was sprinkling.


The gun fired and over 7,000 runners took off.
Leta and I walked back to the car and made our way downtown, to catch Jesse around mile 7. We got downtown and watched as the leaders led the way. Then we both spotted him running down the hill and we screamed and cheered as loud as we could. He saw us and even "smiled" for a picture. :) He didn't look tired at all and we were very impressed with how close he was to the front.

We quickly walked back to the car and drove back to the start/finish line. By this time it was raining hard and the temperature was dropping. Jesse said the last 2 miles were like "running up a waterfall" as it was up steep hills and raining the hardest then. We finally reached the finish line and waited anxiously for Jesse to come around the home stretch.

We saw him coming and screamed like crazy, but his concentration was on the finish line. :) He completed the race in 1:31:33 and came in 79th place out of 4,950 who finished the race. I was sooooo proud of him!!





Leta has participated in several marathons and had great advice for Jesse :)


We were loving the ponchos :)




AWESOME job in his first marathon, hope it's not his last! :)