Liz left today. That's sad.

After a six day "Made on Maple" Korean Convention, Liz had to leave today.  After dropping her off stoically at the bus stop, it took me about five minutes to think about how long I've known Liz (15 years), how important she is in my life (very), how much fun I have being with her (tremendous amount), how much we can get done together (you would be jealous), before I started crying.  Six days simply wasn't long enough.  But then again, no length of time would probably be long enough.  I miss her all the time.  Thanks Balena Family for sharing my best friend with me for a week.  I guess this means the next MOM convention probably needs to be in the Bay Area!

In true Markos/Zackrison (our maiden names) style, we didn't want to waste a single minute of our six days together.  Since her flight wasn't leaving until 6pm, and there was the Filial Piety Hwaesong Marathon (say that six times fast) today, I signed us up!  Liz agree to carry the camera throughout the entire event.

 There was a 5K, 10K, and half-marathon, with about 20,000 participants in total.  Why I can't consider running any of the shorter distances is a blog post for another time...

The start line:

The group massage before the starting gun went off.  This is not a joke.  The Koreans took this completely seriously (except for the old guy behind me who I'm assuming felt it indecent to rub the shoulders of an unknown woman). 

The spray bottle guy.  He went around spraying everybody with some unknown substance at the start of the race.  I thought it might be sunscreen, but can't be sure, and felt that it was very strange that he could just spray me without my consent.

The guys who mostly ran with us.  And cheered us on, and told us to run whenever they saw us (mostly me) trying to walk up those darn hills. 

Liz, who claimed she hadn't trained for the race, proved to me once again why she's been my running idol for the past 15 years.  Out of nowhere, her long distance endurance shone through as she was dragging me up hill after hill, all with a smile on her face.  I would hate her if I didn't love her so much.

One bad part was that aid stations weren't very plentiful, and it was the hottest day of the year, to-date.  From afar off we could see this aid station coming, and were anticipating the cool drink of water, only to be greeted by tables of wet sponges.  Liz may, or may not have opted to drink the water straight from the sponge.  She's die hard like that. 

The scenery, most of the race.

Except when we ran past the city dump? 

There really isn't anything like a race to cement a friendship, and make memories that will carry us through the next 15 years.

And, I'm so glad that I get to check another thing off of my list:

• Run a Korea Long Distance Race.

Check.

Bye Liz.  Thanks for coming.