Day 10 – Race Day – CTHikergal Travels

The day was finally here, Mike’s 15k race. Up at 4 a.m. out the door by 5 a.m. to walk across the park to the race. He picked up his tracker and we waited. I was lucky enough to be able to bring my coffee.

At 5:45 runners were assembled at the start and promptly at 6 a.m. they started.

As soon as I saw Mike go past the start, I jetted across the park to catch him on the other side, the only place I could see him before the finish line.

After that I went back to the house and prepped breakfast for post race eats.

I headed down to see the finish. I saw the male and female winners. The female is just 14 years old and this was the second time she has won for women, she won last year also.

Mike crossed the finish line at 1 hour 31 minutes, finishing almost middle of the runners once times were listed. Not bad for a non runner, having been a swimmer most of his life.

He wanted to jump in the ocean after the race, so we headed off to San Souci beach so he could dip in the ocean. Perks of racing in Hawaii, a nice float in the ocean after.

Once back at the house, we had papaya boats, eggs with swiss chard and a little bit of the cake bombs we picked up yesterday at Pipeline. We then planned out the day. Off to the beach for a little bit of the morning.

We decided to stick close to home, so we stopped at one of the access points for Kahala Beach. Lovely beach. We did a nice long walk and then plopped down.

Well, we didn’t last long, the wind picked up and pelted us with sand, I was afraid we would turn into sand dunes if we stayed much longer. We gathered up our gear and decided we might try the beach park, it looked empty on our walk, just a wedding going on and not many people.

Well by the time we made it to the beach park, about 40 minutes after our walk, there was no parking available, hmmmmm what to do? Can you guess what we did? We went to lunch at Kona Brewing Pub in Hawaii Kai. We visited here 5 years ago with our friend Colleen after one of our hikes. We had a great meal and good beers. Kona beer is way better fresh than from a bottle shipped to the mainland.

After a leisurely lunch, we returned to the house to rest. The owners set up a hammock and Mike had to try it out for his downtime. He texted me a picture of his view!

After dinner of leftover poke and other grub, we headed over to where our friend is staying on her impromptu trip in a little over a week. We wanted to provide her with some pictures of where she will be staying and the views she will have walking over to the beach.

We then walked down to our beach about .5 mile away. The views looking over to the sunset weren’t spectacular, but we enjoyed them. We sat on a beach and stayed for a bit until a guy sat next to us smoking a cigarette. Well it didn’t really matter, the best part of the sunset had happened, to many clouds to make a stunning one, so we left.