Ah, the Daniel Boone Homestead. Although I grew up not too far from here, I can’t recall ever knowing this is where Daniel Boone was born. To be fair, to this day I still sometimes confuse Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Not sure why that is — I mean, I know Davy killed himself a “bar” when he was only three. I guess I always thought of Boone as more a Kentuckian.
In any case, this was the wettest day of the series. And for some reason, the out section felt much, much shorter than the return… I swear the return, albeit over the same ground, was twice as long every loop. It was like running in Doctor Who’s Tardis, the inside much bigger than the external phone booth should allow.
The 14-loop course was riddled with some serious mud and puddles… so much so that eventually the grass itself was so soaked that you splish-splashed through it just as much as if you ran through the ever deepening mud puddles in the center of the trail. Needless to say, my shoes and feet were at 100% soak level early on in the race… and remained that way throughout.
That damn black cone… at the conclusion of this day, I’d have seen it on this series 48 times. Forty-eight loops in at the end of Day 3.
In the face of never-ending rain, mud, and puddles, I finished up the day third overall with a time of 3:54:34.
This is Kate and Cathy, the timers who ensure the numbers work out. They’re great — always smiling even in the worst of conditions. That’s true of the entire Mainly Marathon team but on this day, I insisted on grabbing a photo with them… maybe because they were under a dripping tarp and I felt especially grateful that they were out there for us.
So too was I grateful for those dark chocolate drop cookies of death that Norm makes — I scarfed down a bunch of them as they’re a rare treat… not the healthiest thing maybe but I’d just finished my third marathon in three days and I was, like Leo Bloom, “I’m wet. I’m wet. I’m hysterical and I’m wet!”
As a final note, upon leaving the Daniel Boone Homestead, I stopped for gas. I’ve never seen this before but here’s a gas station that’s actually competing with itself. If you come in from the left, gas is $2.349. Come in from the right? $2.369. Political statement? Crazed divorce proceedings wherein one partner got the lower number pumps and one partner got the higher number pumps? Who can say?
