Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Not fast, but not last

When you take the time to voyage off the beaten path to a quaint little island where no motorized vehicles are allowed, where fudge is king and where lilacs are being honored, you can't help but have a most awesome time. And boy did we have a memorable adventure!


It was so great that we may just head back to Mackinac Island in September and October to run a couple more races and complete the Triple Crown because Mom has developed a case of the medal envy and she really thinks we need to earn the special one for completing all three!  But hold on I am getting ahead of myself...

First of all, this trip wasn't really about the running at all.  It was about traditions, more specifically the Mom's Bucket List tradition started when our mom turned the big 6-0 a couple years ago.  Each year on June 10th, we are making the time to celebrate our Mom. She's pretty awesome, I mean where do you think we get our awesomeness from!?  So this tradition has become sacred.  And while we are at it, we  help her complete her bucket list one awesome trip at a time.  It is a girls trip with the three Smith Sisters and our one super cool Outlaw Sister, Leslie (Yes, we call everyone who married into our family an outlaw because it is just FUN and a little ridiculous!) and of course the trip wouldn't be complete without mom's BFF, Kelly! 

So for our third annual bucket list trip we talked Mom into adding the Lilac Festival to her List because we don't actually have a copy of her Bucket List, the Festival started the day before her birthday and most importantly Lilacs have always been her favorite flower (Growing up we spent countless hours stealing lilacs out people's lawns to deliver to Mom on Mother's Day. It is somewhat surprising none of us were ever arrested for trespassing). It helped that Mackinac Island is a super cool destination and none of us had been there in decades.  The fact that the 10K race happened to land smack dab on June 10th was surely coincidental and very convenient for us!  Opportunity was definitely knocking for the Sisters; We may have drooled over the possibility of running at 10K on Mackinac Island especially me because running a race on Mackinac was actually on my Bucket List.  So unlike the first year when everything we planned was a complete surprise for Mom, this time we told mom about our plan to make sure she approved. She agreed that it sounded like an excellent trip so she edited her Bucket List to include the Lilac Festival and we booked our room, signed up for the race and started planning everything LILACS!  Then in March, I learned there was a hotel on the island with Lilac in the name so we canceled our original reservation, booked a suite at the Lilac Tree and continued planning everything LILACS and the LILAC LADIES were born!

Well lots of the trip details are special to us so I won't share them with you... unless you wake up at the wee hours of the morning to run with me and then I will likely ramble on about them for hours on end, but the race was amazing and I shall share that experience here because this is after all a running blog... oh and somewhere amidst that great bucket list story the tagline of our race was born, "Not Fast, But Not Last" which proved to be absolutely true!

This race is a unique experience and I definitely recommend you run it yourself for several reasons  the least of which was not the lack of portajohns combined with the fact that I never had to wait to use a bathroom either-STRANGE and SURREAL.  The race started on the main street with all the cute shops lining the roads. Nearly 1000 runners gather to run this race each year so the crowd is HUGE.  The Emcee asked for a volunteer to sing the National Anthem and she was surprisingly, AMAZING (unlike our Karaoke debut later that night, but who is keeping track)!  Equally unusual was the fact that the starting line was not set up until roughly two minutes before race time because the horses and bikers needed to be able to get use the road.  There was a brief announcement about race etiquette and horses having the right of way and we were off!  When the race started, we enjoyed the strip for a few minutes and then quickly headed off the beaten path and cut through the middle of the island which meant HILLS, but thankfully they were not too BIG and they were done fairly quickly.  Then we finished with three miles along the breathtaking Lake Michigan coastline. 


The Lilac 10K Crew and Support Staff

Not Fast, But Not Last...
and possibly coming back in the fall!

Vern Out


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