Viva Las Vegas ~ The Recap

One of the ladies I went to Vegas with has a cousin who owns a condo just right off of the LV Strip. This was only small part of the view from my room!

We had an amazing panoramic view of the city, and it only cost me $10 ~ my portion of the cleaning fee...

Vegas is a very interesting place...no, we didn't do any gambling, in fact, we didn't even step foot into a casino, I know this probably disappoints some of you, but I did see some fascinating people...I will just leave it at that. 

Getting to the starting line was a little tricky with ALL the road closures, but we finally found a way through and got a parking spot and ran over just in time to visit the port a potties and have the gun go off. They shot off the fireworks over the strip, which was such a cool thing to see. 

As we started inching our way across the start line, I got a little weepy, I was so excited to be running another marathon (this was #11), and with the fireworks and Elvis singing Viva Las Vegas it was just cool.  There were about 15 thousand runners (full & half marathoners combined).  

                                       

The first 4 miles were really crowded with walkers and so I was having to dodge in and out of them, but once the half marathoners split off it was wide open. 

There was a run through wedding chapel at mile 6-ish and just after that was a line of about 10 Elvis' on the sideline, which was a total energy boost, seeing so many in one place. Of course, all along the course there was someone running as Elvis...

The weather was great! It wasn't too cold, there was a nice cloud covering, and not a lot of wind, it was a perfect day for running a marathon! I was feeling good and running strong and it just felt fabulous to be out there.

 

I started getting nauseated at about mile 18, but I stayed strong and just tried to run through it. Does anyone else have this nausea problem?? What do you do to keep it at bay? 

That last stretch before the finish line was the frontage road of I-15. There were more spectators than I had anticipated, which was really nice. As I turned to go around Mandalay Bay to the finish line I started getting weepy, I do that EVERY time...but as I crossed the finish line, there was Clara, it was so nice to see a friendly face and I cried, of course! 

I went into this race with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised, they had an aid station at every mile, with port a potties at each, and they also had a potty at every half mile as well. They took tons of pictures, MarathonFoto was everywhere. They didn't run out of cups at mile 22...it was mile 25! I was glad I brought my own post race food because there was NO post race food, not one morsel. They had water, gatorade, regular & chocolate milk and orange punch..that was it! Next year that won't be an issue since Rock & Roll bought the LV Marathon! Yeah!  All in all it was a fabulous weekend and a fabulous race. I finished in 4:33. Viva Las Vegas!