Dogfish Dash 2012

This weekend we were back at the Broadkill Beach Club to help out with wedding party prep and to run the most popular race in town–the Dogfish Dash!

The Dogfish Dash is a race put on by Dogfish Head Beer in Milton, DE. The race starts at the brewery, loops town (or double loops town if you’re running the 10k option) and then finishes back in the brewery parking lot with a really big party. This year’s edition of the race sold out completely in a couple of hours, so I guess its reputation proceeds it. Or people really just like a $25 5k with 3 full sized beers in the end.

The BBC Cheer Squad manned the major intersection in downtown Milton and cheered away. Turned out this was a really good spot, because we saw all of the 5k runners twice and all of the 10k runners four times. Noel was running the 10k, and we saw him three times in the spot before heading to the finish.

Noel looked great throughout the entire race. It was his first 10k, and he did a great job.

Dogfish Dash is a fundraiser for the Nature Conservancy of Delaware, and the race strives to be trash free and uses all recyclable items, including reusable bags and reusable water bottles. Keeping with this theme, every year they have a recycled costume contest, and we really enjoyed seeing all of the entries run by. By far our favorite was this “six pack”. Sure they took almost an hour to cover a 5k, but it’s hard to shuffle beer carrier.

After a solid hour of cheering, we headed to the finish line to cheer Noel in. And enjoy the post race party. Everyone seemed really excited for all of that Dogfish goodness at the end.

And here’s where things kind of broke down. Although the items offered at the post race party were awesome, and the race had a great spectator policy ($10 for food and three full sized beers, yes please!) it was nuts. Despite many beer tents and a huge food setup the lines were ridiculous. Like, get out of one and get into another, or you wouldn’t have enough time to enjoy everything. This was surprising, since we’ve been to other Dogfish events with a ton of people and they’ve always moved people quickly.

But once we all had food and beer, we were pretty happy. It was a lot of beer so early in the morning, but hey, that’s okay.

So, you may be wondering why I wasn’t running this race. Well, I was supposed to run it, until earlier this week. It seems that sometime after the Disneyland Half I hurt my left hamstring/IT band, and then by continuing to run on it, I irritated the right side too. There has been a lot of limping in my life the past few weeks, and a week of running that literally left me crying out in pain. So it’s finally sunk in that I’m actually hurt, and I’ve been spending a lot of time at physical therapy.

I’ve also made the difficult decision to defer my entrance to this year’s Marine Corps Marathon. Up until this weekend I had maintained some hope that I could bounce back, squeeze in one more long run, and make it across that finish line on October 28. But after a trial run yesterday that didn’t go so well, I know I’m just out of time. And even if I do start feeling better next week, I don’t know how I go from no running to an 18 mile run. So it’s time to pull out, focus on getting healthy, and regroup for the Walt Disney World marathon in January. This is not how I wanted my first marathon cycle to end, but I need to come to term with the fact that I just can’t control things like this. No matter how upsetting it is.

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