favorite race, favorite race shirt and favorite hardware

on my very boring drive home from work this evening i was thinking about some of my favorite races, race t-shirts, and medals or equivalent hardware. i actually cherish all of my race t-shirts even the fugly (not a misspelling) ones. i have about 100 of them saved in my bedroom armoire and plan to send them off eventually to have a quilt made with them, like this one:

okay, now on to the subject at hand. my favorite race t-shirt by far was the last one i earned. i say earned because you didn't get it until you finished the race. this is the nike, dry fit t-shirt, made from the finest recycled polyester(polyester can be recycled, who knew?) from the 2009 nike women's marathon in san fran back in october:

the front of the shirt

and the back of the shirt. unlike most shirts with a million sponsors splattered on the back, this one is simple.

and now for my favorite piece of hardware, reward, prize, call it what you like if you earned it:

finally, a medal you can wear without killing your neck. this is the necklace that you get at the end of the nike women's marathon. since it's made for nike, by tiffany & co., it has a running theme on front that says run like a girl.

and the back of the necklace/medal reads NWM (nike women's marathon), SF for san francisco and 2009, tiffany & co. at the very bottom in tiny letters. let me tell you how much i love this necklace...I LOVE IT! but, i'm scared to wear it for fear that i will lose it and if that happens, i will LOSE it fo-sho! so for now, it stays in the coveted, pretty light blue box, in its pretty little light blue pouch.

as for my favorite race of all time, it goes without saying...

I could never run this race enough. i'm pretty sure it will be on my list for 2011

so now i wanna hear and see everyone else's favorite race, race t-shirt, and medal or equivalent (doesn't have to be a running race either).

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i had a great training session this morning...ran 5.5 miles/swam 2100 meters/biked 21 miles then went to work. when i first started doing this schedule, i thought i would be dead tired come 3 pm but quite the opposite. i'm full of energy. ALL DAY! funny thing is, my main reason for doing this is that i would rather be training than sitting in stupid, stand still traffic getting nothing done except growing more and more aggravated. so i've really gotten to where i like this morning routine on tuesdays and thursdays and look forward to it.

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i finally remembered something today that a professor in college taught me. it was a class i loathed, one of those completely unecessary classes that they made you take...you'll never guess what it was - swimming! yes, swimming. but more from a teaching stand point versus me swimming laps. so basically, i could teach anyone how to do the front crawl, backstroke, butterfly, etc...but couldn't freakin do it myself all that well. aren't those some of the best teachers and coaches? the one's that were never that good at their game but made awesome coaches and then the one's who were great at their skill, made terrible coaches. long story short, first day in the pool, he tells us, "get in the dead man floating position, close your eyes, exhale all of the air from your lungs, count to five and then open your eyes. what was the point of this exercise you ask? well, when i opened my eyes, guess what i saw? i saw that i was almost at the bottom of the pool. when we came back up, professor G explained to us that some of us are sinkers and some of us are floaters. that's the day i knew i was cursed. obviously, the leaner you are, the more you tend to sink...dammit! so i'll just blame my poor swimming on that and continue to plug away at becoming better each day.

much love and peace out!