Race Cheer Squad for Hire (jk I’ll do it for free)

I’ll be damned if it wasn’t 10x more fun than I thought it’d be.

When my (admittedly short) list of friends all had other stuff to do I considered renegging on my OC Marathon cheer plans. Standing on the side of a road at 6:30am cowbelling by myself seemed slightly less than awesome…

‘But you told all those people you’d be there, at the top of the hill at mile 11.5 to push them through the pain cave! Come on, what else do you have to do? Hey, let’s make a poster! Is CVS still open?’

Lucky for me Kristina ended up being able to come which made it double the fun (and double the noise – sorry Back Bay residents.) We camped our happy non-running asses out on the course for three hours yelling every motivational or funny thing we could think of.

It was a fucking blast.

the start of the “parade”

We got to see a ton of familiar faces – Pam, Sarah, Monica, Gisele, Allison, Kat, Caroline, our neighbor friend Kristin, reader Tracy, a few other people who called out (hi again, whoever you were!), strangers wearing Oiselle who I crazy shouted “LOVE YOUR SHORTS/TOP/OISELLE!” at, and about 15,000 other strangers. We yelled “Go ____!” at anyone wearing anything that stood out (superman! tutu! orange shirt! team jake! oakland raiders!), and cycled through the following mantras eight bagillion times, somehow without annoyance:

• “Way to go, runners!”
• “Looking goooooood!”
• “Yeah, you got this!”
• “Keep it up, you’re doing great!”
• “Wooo(voice crack)hoooooo!”

We saw a dude run by in full firefighter gear and were too preoccupied yelling how awesome he was at him to get a pic, so after he passed I grabbed my phone and took off on (what felt like) a dead sprint to recreate the moment. Good god you’d think I just finished the marathon myself the way I was aching and groaning. Creeek! Errr! Crack! Trying to move quickly after being upright and essentially immobile other than your cowbell arm for a long period of time is not advised. But I powered through because seriously how cool is this dude? (And good-looking, to boot.)

After Instagram stalking, I learned this is Fireman Joe

He ran the full marathon in his fire gear, including a 40 pound air tank (how heavy does your hydration pack feel now?) to raise money for the National Fallen Firefighters Association. According to this article Sunday was his fourth marathon, and he’s completed two half-ironmans and two FULL IRONMANS in his gear. Amazing, easily takes the cake for the most badass thing of the morning.

* Oiselle Haute Volee teammate Allison winning the half was a very close second. :)

smiling, cruising, rocking the shit out of that elite Oiselle kit to a 2 minute win

Already looking forward to the next race to hold down the sideline at – Kristina and I have a good long list of sign ideas ready…

Once my cowbell blisters heal.

Sarah OUaL