Dear OYE Family and Friends,
Thank you again for your incredible display of support this past month as we've been pounding the pavement preparing for this race. Family and friends have turned out in huge number to support us and OYE, and we are grateful.
Incredibly,
we have surpassed our $4,000 joint fundraising goal and are almost at $5,000 as of this morning!!! Donations are still coming in and we couldn't be more pleased with the success of Race4OYE 2011. Combined with Michael's donations,
this single marathon has raised over $6000 for OYE! We received donations from $10 to $500 from kids, grown ups, students, volunteers, professionals, philanthropists, old friends, new friends, family, and colleagues. Every donation will make a difference for OYE and we can't thank you enough.
A bit more about the race for those interested...Saturday night Team OYE gathered in El Progreso for a pre-race pasta dinner and to make race t-shirts, designed by our great friend Edoardo Umanzor (pic below). Coty Mayo and Gerald Velasquez, OYE becado and art program coordinator, screen-printed the shirts, which almost got ruined in the overnight rain as they were hanging out to dry. We were all super happy it rained though because it cleared up the San Pedro Sula sky, well known for it's pollution (one of our supporters compared running a marathon in San Pedro Sula to smoking seven packs of Marlboros), and cooled off the race course....making the heat
almost bearable on race day.
Weather on race day: 90 degress, heat index of 101.
We arrived in San Pedro Sula Sunday morning at 6:30am with a truck full of runners and OYE supporters. Five of us were supposed to run but at the last minute 2 more OYE volunteers from the US decided to join us. With more than 2,000 other racers, our group of 7 started the race together at about 7.45am, about 45 minutes late in true Honduran tradition!
For the first 10K race conditions were excellent, except for a couple of large, uncovered man-holes. (To our knowledge no racers were lost in those though....we hope.) There was plenty of water, gatorade and medical care available and police did a great job holding back traffic. Ana and I energetically crossed the finish line of the 10K with our good friend Hadith Alvarado, but we still had another 10K to go.....
Edoardo and Hadith
The next 10K proved to be much less organized, and a bit more painful. We think about 80% percent of racers stopped at the 10K mark and those that did ran the half-marathon were obviously much faster than us because we were pretty much
completely alone for the second half of the race. We saw less than 10 other runners! (And, to make it even more lonely, our otherwise loyal TeamOYE support team also disappeared for the second half. We later learned they went on a baleada run. Shameless.)
Fortunately or unfortunately though (we're still not sure), there were plenty of police motorbikes and ambulances still patrolling the course. So many so that each of the racers still on the course appeared to get a personal police and ambulance escort for the second half of the race! You have to imagine it- Ana and I running with an ambulance full of Red Cross volunteers and a police bike literally trailing 5 feet behind us. We thought any minute they would start honking and shouting for us to hurry up. They never did though and patiently followed us all the way to the finish line where our Race4OYE teammates were back from their baleada run and waiting with congratulatory hugs. We finished in more or less
2 hours, 35 minutes- much faster than we expected. Official race results still aren't posted.
After some pictures and a brief stop at the medic tent for post-race ice packs and massages we were on the road home.
Thank you again for following our race and supporting OYE!We are threatening to start P90X (another training program) today, so any of you who want to donate to that cause- just let us know! ;) Just kidding!
