Run This Town

Subtitle: How long does it take 3 girls to put 15 signs in the ground at a 5K?

Answer: definitely an hour and a half.  Because it's not as easy as it sounds when the sun hasn't risen and you're running on 4 hours of sleep. 

We had a gorgeous weekend here last weekend, which was great because I started it at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning setting up for the Bright Beginnings 5K.  My placement for Junior League was planning and working the race, so I have officially finished for the semester.  My job specifically entailed taking about 15 signs and placing them around the course path... sounds easy, right?  I was put on a team with two friends of mine and we were given a hammer, a staple gun (to affix the signs to the stakes), and a map of the course (which was essentially a giant triangle) and we took off in my car to place them.  We encountered many problems right away... we had a regular driving hammer when a sledge hammer or mallet would have been more useful, our hand-drawn map was most definitely not to scale and unbeknownst to us it did NOT include all of the buildings in the park, and we hadn't been through the entire course so we didn't have a good idea how much of the course was left since the map wasn't exactly accurate, and when it's that early in the morning, you don't exactly think to use the odometer in the car.  We also didn't know that there would be cones set up already with mile markers.  So needless to say, we guesstimated where mile marker 2 was supposed to go (we were WAY off- apparently we have no idea how to judge distances) and based everything else off of it.  We ended up putting 9 of the signs on the leg we started on- so they were all incredibly close together- and spread the remaining 6 out over the other two legs.  Ultimately we ended up doing it all twice- we pulled about half of the first 9 signs we stuck in the ground and filled in gaps on the other 2 sides, and we moved the mile markers to the right spots.  Gotta love it!  The two girls that I was teamed up with weren't exactly great with hammers, so I ended up doing most of that while they held the stakes and stapled the signs to them.  I started wishing I'd brought my work gloves with me, but luckily someone ever-so-thoughtfully left a pair on the road for us to use:

Just kidding.  I don't even want to know why there were used latex gloves randomly on the side of the road in a park at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning.  Sick. 

Anyway, the race was a success.  Here's a shot of the last group of runners to leave the starting line:

Pretty morning, right?  The park was great.  It's on an island right by the district and you can see the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial from various parts of it.  Very pretty to see the sun rise over all that.  The rest of my Saturday including buying a gardenia bush and planting it in the backyard.  I was going to post a pic but my camera is dead so it is currently recharging.  Perhaps another time.  I have no idea how long we'll be in this house, but rest assured that if we don't kill this bush, it'll be moving with us!  I love how fragrant gardenias are.  Fingers crossed that this one lives!

Oh, and if you're interested in learning about Bright Beginnings, go here.