Saturday

Spent most of the morning walking around, seeing some of the sites of Beirut. It's really a beautiful city, and if the political stuff would get over with it would be much better. A lot of the downtown area is barricaded, so navigating is a little hard at times. There are armed guards all over the place keeping things safe, so no need to worry walking around the streets.

Walked all the way to ABC Mall to pick up my race number and the kid at the registration desk gave me the number of Mark Dickinson, the race director. I called him and he invited me to go to lunch with them. He's excited to have me start my journey here. I also found out that out of the 18000 or so people in the race, only 340 are in the marathon. Around 13800 in the 10K, and 5200 in the 5K. Get this--on official registration closing date, only 1000 were registered. Talk about screwing up the logistics!!

I also met Marek Tronina, the race director of the Warsaw marathon. I may go run his marathon next September. Might be fun.

Spent the rest of the day just hanging out, doing a little siteseeing. Time to catch a beer, a light supper, and wind down for the night. Looking forward to a nice day tomorrow.

and the adventure continues....