Rob Ballou

And the race is cancelled

I left yesterday morning, dragging myself through the rain to the airport via a ticket-less ride on the Metrolink (install covered ticket machines and you may have made $4; wet money does not work well for buying tickets from a machine). Landing at Dulles it was warm and sunny, as perfect weather as can be expected for a half-marathon at the end of the summer.

That was, if we would have ran the race Thursday or Friday. Tonight, tropical storm Hanna is heading this way and so the folks at the North Face Endurance Challenge cancelled the race. I can't completely disagree with their reasoning. Beyond the safety concerns of people, the trails would be destroyed after several thousand people ran a race in a downpour.

And now I'm left figuring out if I want to try to get an event in before the end of the year. This was going to be my big event of the year, closing out the summer season and providing a marked transistion from concentrating on running to a focus on cycling. Now I may take on some of a trail-running series or find an end-of-the-year mountain bike races (road races are pretty much over). I hopefully will have lined up enough funds for a new mountain bike by the end of the month, which is exciting!

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