My dear friend Stacey and I rocked the Las Vegas Rock and Roll Half-Marathon last week, in honor of our 40th birthdays, and we did it in world-record-setting fashion.  Our feet are still hurting because we kicked so much ass… asphalt, that is, 13.1 miles of it on the Las Vegas Strip.

Actually our 40-year-old feet are still hurting (as are our knees, hips, shoulders and toes) because they are 40-year-old feet, knees hips, shoulders and toes.

Not only was my 2 hours, 44 minutes, 43 seconds good enough for a mid-pack finish (22,064th of 33,257 half-marathon finishers and 38,000 or so starters) and not only did Stacey triumph at 2:42:42 for 21,443rd place, but the Las Vegas Half-Marathon also set a World Record for the Largest Nighttime Running Event.

Ergo, Stacey and I are now world-record holders.

But it’s not where we finished that matters – it’s that we started the race in the first place and that we managed to make it through. A quick recap: I live in Arizona, which is about five blocks from the surface of the sun. About five months ago when it was 105 degrees out, I decided to start training for this little adventure in response to an email from Stacey: “Hey, I was thinking of running the Las Vegas Half-Marathon.”

I took a long draw on my crack-pipe and replied, “I think that’s a great idea! Let’s do it!”

Since that time, temperatures in my state have not dipped below 42 degrees.  This being a night race, the temperature at the start (sunset, 5:30 PM) was 42 degrees with light winds out of the east… and it was only gonna get colder. I wore my running tights, my good socks, my lucky jog bra, my long-sleeved shirt, my bright-green wind jacket, my black knit gloves and my hot-pink head condom – and I was still freezing my ass off. My teeth clattered together. My body convulsed with gooseflesh. Stacey and I huddled together (on our feet), our faces up-turned to the life-giving flame of flickering patio heater. We probably should have been sitting down to rest before the big race, but that sad chair was cold comfort in the frozen face of pending hypothermia.

With 15 minutes till race time, we plowed our way through a mid-sized town of shivering joggers toward our starting corral. As a first-time half-marathoner, I slowly, but fiercely predicted a 2:45 finish time, which placed me in corral 30. Running in her fourth half-marathon, Stacey was more confident of a strong finish and was placed ahead of me in corral 24. According to the Official Rules, you have to start in your assigned corral, seeing how you conveniently assigned yourself to it. If you’re running with friends, you can start together in the slowest assigned corral. This makes for a smoother start, so the faster runners don’t run over the more leisurely pacers. Your corral was indicated clearly  your race bib – Stacey was 24814 and I was 30582, ergo, we started together in corral 30.

Apparently about 4,000 of our fellow competitors completely disregarded the rules, because once we got started, we passed their 44, 35, 38, 40, 37 and 42-clad asses. It was getting to the starting line that was the problem. The first corral went off at 5:30… and each subsequent corral went off at 2-minute intervals until they finally gave up and just let us all run. Suffice it to say, my calves were cramping from the cold by the time we hit the official starting line, two blocks away, at 6:02 PM.

Anyone who has ever walked on the Las Vegas Strip and thought they’d make it to Caesars Palace in no time because it’s just one more block knows that objects in Vegas are much farther than they appear. When you’re running across the frozen, neon-clad tundra while trying to spawn upstream among 33,000 competitors, objects are about 5 times farther than they normally appear, and when your knee is barking and your shoulders are revolting and you’re running back up the Strip toward the finish line at Mandalay Bay, objects are 20 times farther they appear.

Especially Mandalay Bay.

Especially when the finish line features a slight (ARE YOU KIDDING ME?) uphill grade.

That said, Stacey and I ran splendidly together. It was only the second time we’ve ever run together and the first time over a significant distance. We each plugged in our respective music – she with her Pitbull and I with my 2 hours and 45 minutes of assorted Cage the Elephant, Ted Nugent, Smashing Pumpkins, Led Zeppelin, Jay-Z, Sponge, T.I., Moby, Foo Fighters, Cee Lo Green, Pink Floyd, Tool, Timbaland, Joan Jett, Rage Against the Machine, Joan Osborne, Van Halen, Adele and Stevie Wonder – and we started swimming. I kid you not.

The city of Las Vegas shut down the Strip for this race – and both sides of that heralded boulevard teemed with runners, joggers, walkers and gawkers. It was a pageant of humanity – sweating, panting, shouting, pacing, cursing, water-slugging, Gu-gulping humanity. Inside lanes were reserved for the 38,000 half-marathoners who started the race – the outside lane (outbound and inbound) was reserved for the 6,000 poor bastards who signed up for the marathon. They started their race at 4 PM, took a 13.1-mile dog leg through west Las Vegas and then merged back with the half-marathon at their halfway point and our starting point. Again with the Official Rules, apparently very few of our fellow half-marathoners had achieved a fourth-grade reading level and even bothered to consult the rules because they were content to walk – WALK?!? – in the lane designated by in-the-way cones, clearly marked signs and bellowing course marshals for the marathon.

There’s a difference between someone who is walking because they are worn out or in distress… and someone who is walking because they thought it would be fun to invest $115 in the pleasure of strolling down the Strip in the Largest Nighttime Running Event in the World, even though their training consisted of nightly 12-ounce curls and trips across the parking lot to the Cracker Barrel. Suffice it to say, I would have thrown an elbow if I’d had the extra energy to expend. Instead, Stacey and I navigated the hoards with deft hand signals, tipped chins and quick nods – accelerating into open spaces, threading around lolly-gaggers and in-between the dawdling walkers and generally managing to stay within eyeshot of one another up until the bitter end.

It was actually pretty awesome (even though I know I slowed her down) at least until the TOURISTS DECIDED TO DRAG THEIR SUITCASE THROUGH THE HALF-MARATHON AT MILE 10 SO THEY COULD GET TO THEIR HOTEL ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STRIP. Let me repeat: At no point during the race was the Strip not clogged 10 bodies across with the Spandex-clad masses (as cheering, non-running spectators thronged the footbridges that conveniently span the valuable airspace above the road so as to reduce congestion). It was like running through Times Square on New Years Eve, except with Dick Clark in a jog bra. And these boneheads thought it’d be a good idea to drag their roller bag perpendicular through six lanes of runners? Sorry, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me. Fuck you.

At the end, I started to falter – my left knee sparking Roman candles of pain up through my hip and down through my ankle. I shooed Stacey on ahead. I didn’t stop running, but I did play Rollin’ in the Deep three times in a row to get me through that last mile (since my 2-hour, 45-minute play list ran out early being how I didn’t account for the 32 minutes it took us to get to the starting line). I lurched (UPHILL) toward the finish line and managed to raise my hands in triumph as I crossed that threshold of relief. Actually I was just raising my arms to make sure I could still feel them.

 

Decked out in our new, very blingy medals, we eventually found sweet husband Pat and our dear friend Penny waiting with the time-honored Bertinelli tradition of post-race champagne in inappropriate glassware. When Pat’s sister Valerie ran the Boston Marathon in 2010 with her trainer Christopher, Pat and I and Christopher’s partner Colin greeted her at the finish line with a squirt-bottle filled with Veuve Cliquot (a whole bottle of champagne almost fits in a standard bicycle bottle – who knew?). Suffice it to say, Colin and I were three sheets by that point (what else are you supposed to do at 10 AM while you’re watching the Boston Marathon from a viewing stand at the finish line… for 5 hours?) And this time around, Penny and Pat were no different – well, they may have been less hammered than Colin and me, but they were no less creative, putting our champagne in Starbucks coffee cups with sippy-lids. SCORE!

Wrapped in our Mylar wind-sheets, we trundled ourselves through what was now 34-degree misting rain to our shuttle back to the hotel.

And this is where I discovered the limits of my then 39-year-old body (and psyche). Even though I managed to finish in 2,638th place in what was then my age-group – bye-bye, women 35-39 – I just can’t party the way I used to, but I’m still a gamer. Though we were likely the first – and only – girl’s weekend in Vegas to go to bed at 10:30 on a Saturday night (the race was on Sunday night, what can I say?) and woke up at 6:30 the next morning (the older you get, the earlier you get up), Stacey, Penny and I pinky-swore that we would make it to the Official Post-Race Party™ at LAVO at the Palazzo – come hell or high water or iliotibial band shenanigans. We stretched, showered and shoehorned ourselves into inappropriate footwear but age-appropriate apparel… at which point, Pat said, “You girls have fun. I’m going to stay in this warm bed and have a night cap and go to sleep.”

Undaunted, we sauntered out (on our feet) – into the cold Vegas night. Actually, we limped, lurched and hobbled down the hallway and stumbled into a cab.

 

As an official fund-raising partner for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, the Las Vegas Half-Marathon featured a walk-through replica of a colon, which is ironic because my biggest fear heading into this race was gastrointestinal hi-jinks (bear with me, this is foreshadowing). Truly, I’ve run enough morning races to roll out, grab a banana, bagel and peanut butter and clamber on to victory (or at least to an unembarrassing finish). But this was the World’s Largest Nighttime Running Event, which carried with it a few hidden pitfalls:

1) It got colder as the night got on (see above)

2) I had absolutely no idea what to eat during the day because all of my night runs tend to give me the runs (see here)

Rest assured, penne pasta with garlic sauce was not the best decision for lunch at 1 that afternoon, though I did not have to stop at any of the sardine-packed port-a-potties, nor did I have explosive diarrhea in the desert. I just burped fire… a lot. Not that it helped clear our path or wilt the roller-bag toting tourists… though it did annoy my companion (sorry, Stacey!)

So we finished the race around 9 PM… got back to the hotel and showered by 10:30 and realized at 11:04 that we were freakin’ starving, having just burned 1,925-or-so calories after running for 2 hours and 45 minutes straight and not having eaten since 1 that afternoon. Thus we succumbed to the luscious loveliness of my new favorite food: the lobster cocktail – which is just like a shrimp cocktail only it has a lobster tail… and it is awesome. Stacey had a meatball the size of a baby’s head. Penny had lobster bisque. I ordered a side of asparagus and contemplated dessert. I had another cocktail and discovered that when you run 13.1 miles, you can metabolize a lot of shit pretty efficiently – including 2 Starbucks cups of champagne, a Cape Cod and a Goose-Pear and soda.

Now, when someone says, “Let’s go get some drinks,” I think “bar.” When someone says “Let’s go get some drinks at a ‘club,'” I assume they want to subject me to an afternoon of torment via overpriced golf which we will then attempt to wipe from our minds with cocktails. When someone says “club,” my first thought is not to pay $20 to subject myself to a sweating fresh hell of lingerie-clad co-eds and men wearing more hair product than I’ve ever applied in the 40 years of my young life… all set to the thumping creations of a skinny Asian dude who calls himself DJ Fill-in-the-Blank with Clever Spelling and Number Combinations. If I wanted to pay $20 to subject myself to a sweating fresh hell, I’d just pack a cooler of Coors Life and play golf at Phoenix Muni in August. I don’t even like to play golf, and I sure as hell don’t like Coors Light.

Oh, and we had to stand (on our feet) in line to get into this club, at which point I said, “They’d better hurry up because I gotta go to the bathroom.”

Penny and Stacey’s eyes widened.

“Not No. 2 – just No. 1 – I stayed hydrated during the race!”

I believe this exchange is one more for the record books because it was likely the first time in the line to get into LAVO that women talked about going to the bathroom to use the bathroom for its intended purposes instead of  snorting a few lines or reapplying their lipstick. I know I’m getting older: I now talk about my bowel habits in public… oh wait, I’ve always done that. Next!

So we walked (on our feet) up three flights of stairs to get into the “club,” and it was everything that I hoped it would be:

First let’s note that LAVO is an actual Las Vegas Nightclub™ which has a dress code – but on this night, it also served as the Official Post-Party™ for the Las Vegas Rock and Roll Half-Marathon. So you had two kinds of people mixing in this combustible cocktail of hip-hop and hair gel: People who were wearing cotton and relatively sensible shoes (like me and the rest of the runners) and people who were fire-hazards (the standard club patrons)… and the place was so packed that my first thought was, “Shit, I survived running through 33,000 people on the Strip only to be trampled to death in a mad dash to the exits at a nightclub which is clearly in violation of fire codes and zoning restrictions.”

My second thought was, “Where can I find a drink?”

The answer was NO WHERE. The line to get to the bar was 12-deep. I couldn’t even find the line to get to the line to the bar. The difference between a club and a bar is that you can actually get served in a bar. If you get served in a club, I think it means you’re being challenged to a dance-off, which I would definitely have lost at LAVO, as my only moves consisted of crushing my eyelids tightly together to block out the seizure-inducing strobes and bending my knees about a half-inch at a time to the beat of DJ Skinny Asian Dude with Clever Spelling and Number Combinations.

Penny and Stacey named my new dance sensation, “The Grimace.” But we came here to dance, and goddammit, I’m a gamer and I was gonna dance (on my feet)!

At least until some random stiletto stepped on my foot, at which point I said, “No mas! I’m done!” And to my great relief, Penny and Stacey agreed! (!!!) We held hands as Penny navigated our way to the exit. She was like the badass honey badger in that respect, fearlessly digging through the addled crowds to find her way to our salvation.

Back at the hotel, my legs throbbing, my head throbbing, my ears ringing, my Aleve not keeping up with the calamity of my post-race adventure, I had time to ponder the meaning of this day and my life to date: The threshold of mid-life, turning 40, getting old.

Many people have gingerly asked how I feel about the turning of this decade – as if living a life with regret or dread is a life worth living. Until this point – and I hope beyond – I believe I have lived voraciously, consuming every moment for the adventure that it is, while being game for the experience yet to come. That’s not to say I haven’t had cringe-worthy gaffes or fist-pumping triumphs or tooth-grinding anxiety or blurs of mundane days that roll on without incident. All of that makes me who I am, and it will happen every day whether I shirk from it or embrace it.

Turning 40 is not about leaving behind a treasured youth of better days or lurching toward an uncertain future of onrushing age: It’s merely passing another mile marker and realizing I’m just hitting my stride.