The Start Line Village

After numerous checks and re-checks that I had everything I needed laid out for the next day, I actually did manage to get a few hours of sleep before the big day-- although easily beat my 4:30am alarm to the wake up call. My Dad dropped me off at the shuttle buses to the start line at ASU at 5:30am. With more than 36,000 race participants, it's incredible how smoothly this entire process took place. The start line shuttles are one of my favorite parts of the whole big race experience. Everyone is so full of the same nervous excitement that it's easy to make new friends quickly. As the bus ride to the start line in downtown Phoenix got longer and longer, concern started to set in among all of us that we were going to be making our way back this entire distance on foot before the day was out.

The start line village was fun filled chaos where I immediately made
several new friends as we nervously re-checked each other's gear packs, race
numbers, and shoe tags to be sure we had everything we needed. Race organizers
had provided tons of tables filled with free food and samples of all sorts, but
we were more concerned about finding our correct start line and corral numbers.

Celebrating pre-race anxiety....

One of my starting line buddies, Megan from Colorado-- also her first marathon...

Margene-- another excited first-timer...

A few marathon veterans sharing some pre-race advice and comfort...

Double checking our timing tags-- since there are so many participants in major races like this-- these plastic strips tie into each runner's shoe to record the exact time they crossed the start line-- because for us non-elite runners--- that was several minutes after the actual gun went off.

General pre-race chaos-- still waiting for sunrise...

The white bags you see here were our gear check bags. Race organizers arranged for a host of UPS trucks to take all the gear we were not running with directly to the finish line-- an awesome service!