29 Jan 2017 - Big Beach Half Marathon

My honey and me enjoying the beach.

Gulf Shores Alabama! Ha, never heard of it, no idea where it is other than somewhere in Alabama. Why would anyone want to visit Alabama? Big Beach Half Marathon! Wait, now this sounds interesting. You mean I can add Alabama to my goal of running a half marathon in every state and also be on a beach. Heck, I didn't realize Alabama was even on a coast. I love visiting the beach and the water. That's how my January visit to Gulf Shores Alabama came about where state number 15 was checked off after I completed the Big Beach Half Marathon.

This race was my slowest so far. Every aspect of this race was extremely well organized. Here are my race highlights:

The Hangout.

Packet pickup, race start and finish, and the post race party were held here. The Hangout is a restaurant and bar on the beach with a cool party area out back.. Here are a couple fun pictures from the hangout.

Julie won a hat playing bingo!!

Packet Pickup.

Well organized with a handful or vendors where good bargains could be found. I found a good deal on a run jacket and some triathlon gear. The race packet contained the essentials (race bib and shirt) and then mostly literature about other races. The race shirt was a cool long sleeve white technical shirt.

Race Start.

This was a small race. The full and half marathoners all started at the same time. In total there were about 580 people grouped by pace. Before the race the US Navy folks presented the colors and a young lady sang the national anthem. It was pretty touching with the beach in view.

Race course.

I really wanted to like this race course. In fact most of it would be awesome to train on. It just wasn't great in my opinion for a race. The first mile was on a road and was decent since one lane was closed for us to run in. I actually didn't mind this portion since there was some different scenery. Then we turned onto paved trails for the next 9 or so miles. There was hardly any fan support and mostly what we saw were trees. It was peaceful and at times I didn't see any other runners, so for me a few more distractions would have been nice. The last 3 or so miles were on a busy road parallel to the beach. We could see the dunes on the beach but no water and faced a strong head wind the entire time. It would have been so much better if I could have seen the water.

Course support.

The course support was terrific. There were water stops every 2 miles. I think they also had Gatorade and at a couple there were fans cheering us on.

Race Finish.

The race finish was well done. As we approached the finish line there were people cheering for us and encouraging us. As we crossed the finish our name was announced and the finishers medal was hung around out neck. They had bottled water here as well. I love the race medal. It is large and well done.

Post race party.

This was awesome. There was plenty of food options and we received 2 beer tickets! There was a band playing all day during the event and the atmosphere was really fun.

Yummy post race food

Battling the wind in my new jacket after the race

Running Celebrities.

Look at the photo below. That's Brett Favre just to my left with the white shorts. Brett finished about 5 minutes before me. In fact I'm sure he passed me for the final time on one of my walking breaks. I just didn't know it was him. As I said this was my slowest half marathon so far. If I had known Brett was running with me I would have made up the 5 minutes to get a post race photo with him. He registered under the name Brett Lorenzo. Seems Lorenzo is his middle name. He also took off right after the race.

My numbers.

Finish time was 2:11:17 This was a 10:01 pace.
Overall: 135th out of 367 runners
Male 55-59 Age Group: 8th out of 14 runners
Male: 77th out of 137 runners

Other highlights from our trip.

Blindly Trusting Siri for directions.

We flew into Mobile Alabama on Friday evening and relied on Siri (Iphone GPS app) to navigate to our rental house. Unfortunately she took us (after about an hour of driving) to Dolphin Island and suggested we board a ferry boat. Sounded like fun but the only problem is the next ferry boat didn't run until the following day. What could we do at this point but laugh? After this we backtracked back to Mobile and then on to our rental house on stilts in Fort Morgan. The extra couple hours of driving wouldn't have been bad if it had been light out and we could have enjoyed the sights.

Rental House on stilts and beaches with oil rigs

The picture above is our rental house and rental car for the trip. Most of the houses in this area are on stilts. There were a few early initial adventures in the house as the toilet handle broke in the middle of the night and the next morning we couldn't open the shower doors. Being a nice guy I made the repairs and the rest of our stay went fine. We were right across the street from the beach so enjoyed several walks on the beach. Being in the gulf, the beach was different since there were oil rigs everywhere in the distance.

Enjoying the beach and oil rigs.

Sand Fleas

Somehow I incurred over 30 sand flea bites. Most of the bites were on my legs and lower back so I'm guessing the attacks were during the race. This made for about a week of being uncomfortable and itchy since I get an allergic reaction to the bites. Luckily it seems none were of the type where they lay eggs under the skin. I hear those take about 3 weeks to get rid of and also include a Dr visit.

Lambert's Cafe

While driving around an looking for something to do we spotted Lambert's Cafe. The home of the throwed rolls! Any restaurant where they throw dinner rolls at you is worth trying! We were treated to some down home Alabama cooking and a few dinner rolls thrown our way. It was a blast and of course we left with our stomachs way too full.

USS Alabama Tour

We had to drive back to Mobile to tour the USS Alabama (WWII ship) but it was fun and educational. We also toured a WWII submarine (USS Drum) and aircraft museum. It's amazing how much they can cram into those vessels.