three things thursday

1. New York City Half-Marathon - As you all know (since I've said it a thousand times), I'm running the New York City Half-Marathon on Sunday, March 20 (along with Kara Goucher, Ryan Hall and Meb Keflezighi!) I've been training for it, I feel good, I feel ready for it and I'm going for a PR like it's an Olympic gold medal. But there's a little something that's really pushing my buttons about this race. There's no course map! Sure, I know the streets of Manhattan like nobody's business because it's my stomping grounds, but there's no course map, no elevation chart, no nicely plotted out map. Instead, I get this:

If you can't read that (click to enlarge), it's basically turn by turn instructions. What is that?! Are you giving me directions to someone's house?

2. BAA 5k - I'm in! I registered for the BAA 5k. I'm still slightly bitter about the fact that I paid $45 to run a 5k...it was $40 last year and I refused! But I gave in this year because I get to run it with these awesome people.

3. Marine Corps Marathon - I've mentioned a few times in the last week that I registered for the  Marine Corps Marathon. This was purely accidental but I'm so glad I did. Last Thursday, Chloe sent me a message on GChat reminding me of my less than favorable chances of getting into the lottery for the NYC Marathon. Since I registered for the lottery, I've been thinking that my back up plan would be to run MCM but I knew that it would fill fast and that I probably wouldn't hear from NYC until after MCM closed out so I was kind of at a loss of what to do. As Chloe and I were discussing, I checked over to the MCM website to find out that registration had opened the day before and was 98% full. So I frantically sent GChat messages to Lauren and Emily as to what to do. After about a 20 minute deliberation, I decided to register. I filled in all of my information and clicked 'Pay Now.' I was immediately brought back to the home page that said, 'The Marine Corps Marathon is now CLOSED.' I may very well have gotten the last spot in the race! How cool is that? So if I don't get into NYC, I'm going to run the MCM and if I do get into NYC, then I'll defer MCM for the following year! (I'm just not cool enough to be able to run two marathons in less than 7 days)

That's that! Don't forget to sign up for Jason's Cupcake Marathon!

It's *almost* the weekend!