Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Cruise To Run - Days 0 and 1

I'm so sorry it's taken so long to blog again.  I had a week without any real internet access (and the miracle is I survived!) and then we got home and I have barely slept and been swamped in work and trying to catch up on the 1000+ (seriously) blog posts in my Google Reader rather than write my own.

On Sunday the 21st, we boarded a Princess cruise ship with a little group called Cruise to Run.  IM AZ buddies Alex and Susan had done this cruise several times and talked me into signing up last year.  Basically you go on a cruise with a bunch of crazy endurance athletes, do a little race on each island we stop at, have guest speakers (the amazing Sarah Reinertsen and Runners World's own Bart Yasso this year), drink a whole lot of alcohol and confound all the people who are just on the boat to eat their body weights in cream puffs and roast in the sun.

Let's get on this thing already!

We set sail after bedtime on Sunday night and woke up Monday morning pulling into the harbor on the island of St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands!
 Most of the cruisers were still asleep as we disembarked for our first run of the trip.
 With Alex and Susan!
 St Thomas iguana
The St Thomas run was a 5k with an unusual format for determining the winners.  You had to submit your predicted time and run without any watches - the closest to the predicted time wins!  I had a super easy run on the schedule so I submitted 30:30 as my 5k time.  My finishing time?  30:24!  Just 6 seconds off.  Amazingly the top 10 were all within 4 seconds of their prediction.  Still, I was happy with it!
 After we cleaned up from the run and got breakfast, we were off to Magen's Beach on the other side of the island (a quick 15-20 minute hop).  There is no better way to recover from a run, I'm now convinced!




We got lots of open water swimming in while we were there too!



 View of the harbor coming back over the hill
 Monday night was also the first of the formal nights on the cruise, as well as a big free-booze C2R reception.  Par-tay!!






7 comments:

Meredith said...

I wondered when I was going to see a blog post from you!

heather said...

I loved Magen's Beach.

GoBigGreen said...

Oh this makes me NEED to go back to our honeymoon pics and see how lovely the water is in St johns! More pics please:)!

Kim said...

im a wee bit jealous!

Christi said...

I am not a wee bit jealous. I am full on jealous!

Kathleen said...

This sounds like so much fun. You are always doing such great things. Thanks for sharing!

Kathleen said...

This sounds like so much fun. You are always doing such great things. Thanks for sharing!