Bringing Home Baby Norton!

This morning started out not looking too promising.  We kept hitting snooze on the alarm, and woke up only when Jason realized his phone had rung and it was Kim who was outside!  That got us up and moving.  We got ready and headed out with Kim and Andy over to the Police Headquarters to park.  There were people everywhere!  Now I am not a runner by any means, unless I am being chased for some reason, and it was so odd to me to see people running before the race even started.  It was a cold and rainy morning, not ideal I am sure for the runners.  Jason met up with his old partner Patterson so that they could run together, at least to start.  Kim, Andy and I left them to head to the starting area and we went to find Taylor and Micah, our niece and nephew.  There were over 32,000 people participating in the race, so it was incredibly crowded.  We managed to find them, and then set out to find a place to walk.  We got to the finish line just as the first runners came through.  It was very exciting to me when they announced that 5 out of the six top place runners both male and female were from Ethiopia!  We found a spot to watch and settled in for the long haul.  There were waves or runners/walkers beginning with A and running through ZZ.  Each wave started about 2 minutes apart.  The race began at 8:30, but Jason was in group VA which did not even begin until 9:32.  We saw lots of great costumes that runners were dressed up in, including "Octo-dad" (with 8 dolls in a homemade stroller), the Love Guru, and a man hauling a huge boulder I can only imagine meant ball and chain.  It wasn't too long before Tammy (Jason's sister) came through.  She was in group F and is basically a competition runner, and she did amazingly well.  She left alot of men in the dust!  Next came Brian, Tammy's husband, with another great time.  They were both in group F, so we knew we had a while to wait for Jason.  In the meantime, we were hugely amused by the hysterical guys beside us who kept up a steady color commentary (mind you, they had run the race, then come back and stood on the sidelines to wait for their mom) to encourage all of the runners.  Some comments:   "No passing out, the finish line is right there!"  "Way to go really fast guy"  "Nice job cute people that I don't know what your costumes are supposed to be".  We were keeping an eye on the time, because Jason had given us an idea about how long he thought it would take him.  When we saw Patterson run by we figured he couldn't be too far behind since they started together.  Sure enough, not far behind, and way ahead of the time he thought he would make, came Jason.  I took  my pictures, and he stopped to give eveyone with us a hug and a kiss, and then he turned and headed on to the finish line, sprinting down through the finish.  He did an amazing job and we are all so proud of him.  It was a great accomplishment, his first 10K and a super time for himself.