A Marathon Weekend

Yesterday I had the urge to watch "Gone With the Wind." I never saw it before and I am not sure what made me think of it. Possibly the insane wind? I rented it from I-tunes and 8 hours later it was only halfway downloaded. I watched it in fragments 30 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 10 minutes a bit later. I think that's the best way to watch that movie.

Later that night I went to a book publishing party at this little bar, The Black Swan. We got to talking about the Queen's birthday party and I found out that although most people in the country respect and admire the monarchy, more and more people are against the idea of a royal family and their life of privilege. They are upset that their tax money is going towards her lavish parties and they criticize her openly in the gossip magazines. The latest scandal: apparently when she was on her balcony waving to the crowd she had picked up her little grandson to give him a better look. Now she is being compared to Michael Jackson! Ha.

So back to the book publishing party. It was pretty interesting, but we got there pretty late and missed the speeches (I guess that is the highlight of publishing parties). I went with my cousin and his girlfriend. The author is a good friend of my cousin's from high school. I'm guessing he's in his 20's-30's. He wrote a book called "Pragmatisk Paedagogik: Mellem Selvdannelse og Kosmopolitisme" which translates to: Pragmatic Pedagogy: Between Self-Formation and Cosmopolitanism.






He didn't have any English copies. My cousin was telling me some funny stories about them growing up. Apparently his friend was always pretty forgetful and this one time when they were both running a half marathon race, his friend had borrowed his dad's fancy, expensive watch. He made a pit stop during the race and had taken the watch off to wash his hands. He ran back to the race and got a couple miles away before he realized he had left the watch in the bathroom! He had to run all the way back to get it adding a couple extra miles on to his run. The whole while he was running back to the bathroom the crowd was screaming at him, "Turn around!! You're going the wrong way!"

We got on the topic of running, and as it turns out my cousin wasn't drinking because he was getting ready for a half marathon tomorrow morning. Now I always wanted to say I ran a half marathon, but I never ever really wanted to run one. I was a couple drinks deep though and I had absolutely no plans for tomorrow. I was slightly tempted. The price to register was around $30 which is pretty cheap compared to US races. I figured what the hay? Maybe I should try it. I have nothing to do, I could always use some exercise, I have no expectations to win the thing, I have nothing to lose, I could walk if I want to.. It'd be a good way to get outside and see the city... So I woke up this morning, signed myself up for the race, and actually ran the entire thing without getting sick or seriously injured! I didn't do too bad either for not training.. I finished in 1hr 53min, which was 254th place out of 775 women.

Here are some pictures from the race (I'm not in any of them).

The people with the balloons tied to them are the professional runners. The balloons have different finishing times on them (i.e. 1:45, 1:50, 1:55, 2:00 etc.) If you want to try to run the race in 1hr 55min then you can pace yourself off the 1:55 balloon people. I thought that was really neat, but it must be pretty annoying to run around with a balloon tied to you.