NOTC race

Just walked in the door from my trip to New Orleans. What a whirlwind of fun and excitement!!! One thing strikes me really odd.... I enjoy taking pictures and I always have my camera with me, but I didn't take a single photo the entire weekend!

This morning Andrea and I ran the New Orleans Track Club "45th Anniversary Race". NOTC is a HUGE club and they had some nice perks, yet I noticed some fundamental flaws at their race. On the positive side, we received an awesome tech shirt and an embroidered "cool towel". On the flip side.... only 4-porta cans for a large crowd. I know you can never have enough porta cans at a race, but the line wasn't the issue... by the smell, it seemed they were all "full".

The 3-mile race started late, because the prior one-mile race didn't have a cut off time. Not a big issue, but they allowed everyone the opportunity to finish the mile race, which included a few 20+ minute walkers. Essentially, that pushed the main race back 15-minutes.

Another issue I saw, but did not affect me was the finish line shoot. They had separate female and male shoots, manned with three people. This wasn't a chip-timed race, so everyone needed to stay in order AND get a finish slip. I saw countless people leave the shoot without ever getting a slip and witnessed even more people accidentally changing their position in the shoot before receiving their slip because they didn't know what to do. As I said, this had little to do with my race and me.

Both these issues don't amount to much for a walk-runner like me. I was a bit surprised for a club that states they are the 6th largest running club in the US. What did "bother me" was with the volunteers, which seemed to be club members. I interacted with a couple volunteers, which seemed less than friendly. Don't get me wrong, they weren't yelling or cussing, but they were stern, to say the least. My perceptions lead me to believe they didn't want to be there. Just my dumb ole 2-cents.

The weather was a good as it gets for late August. The race should have went better for us due to no fault of NOTC, but Andrea and I had a weekend full of eating massive amounts of Cajun Creole food with one night of entirely too many alcoholic beverages. The race time was just a couple hours ahead of TS Faye, which left NOLA overcast with a nice cool breeze. Due to my lack of training and horrific fueling, I was forced to take TWO walk breaks just to finish the race. Oh well, we had fun.

Not sure of our times and I haven't been able to find anything online yet, but..... I'm pretty sure I finished in the high 33-minute range. Andrea dropped me at the 2-mile marker and finished somewhere closer to low 32-minutes.

Funny thing happened Saturday night. After all our drinking on Bourbon Street Friday night, Andrea and I decided to walk to the French Quarter for a nice quite dinner. As we were walking on Canal Street I saw a man wearing a Houston Strider half-marathon shirt. As I was about to point out the shirt to Andrea, I realized it was Jim Phiffer. What's the odds of that? He wasn't there for the race, just a mini-vacation with his beautiful wife. I thought that was really cool to cross paths so far away from home with a Houston runner, who is no stranger to the winner's podium.