Another long MBA second year weekend and we headed to Bilbao in northern Spain for the night marathon - well, the half at least. We decided to rent a campervan again since we enjoyed it so much last time, and got on the road. Since I hate toll roads, I think we took the more scenic approach which led us by the Pyrenees (the toll road probably had the same view) and we stopped in Pamplona for the night. We didn't see anything there to be honest and left pretty quickly the next day to get to Bilbao.
We walked around the city a little bit and went to the expo to pick up my bib and all that, and ended up doing a little expo shopping! Lain and I got some new shoes for a great price, so we are really happy about that. Bilbao itself was really cool (once we found somewhere to park a campervan), it is really hilly around the city and straddles a river. There are quite a few cool landmarks that I'd be running by the next day. We really enjoyed walking around and stopping at a nice park by the Guggenheim for Emre to play at. We ended the day eating a load of pizza, which probably wasn't the best idea given the race tomorrow night!
The next morning we went walking around where we parked for the night. There was a really nice cliff area leading to the sea, so we strolled around there and chatted for a while which was great. It was much colder and the weather at the beach can best be described as dreary, but not in a miserable way - it was really quite cool. We chatted at the beach for a while before killing time in the campervan before the race. We finally headed down to Bilbao in the early evening by train for the half marathon!
The race went really well. I forgot my GPS watch which was really annoying because I wanted to use it to pace myself. I was hoping for around 1 hour 35 minutes but had no way to know how I was doing during the race - apart from that I was ahead of the 1:35 pacer. It was a great race because there were loads of people lining the street clapping and shouting "animo" for pretty much the whole race. I ended up finishing in 1:30:11, much faster than I'd been hoping for and I was really excited about the time! The whole event got me really excited about for my upcoming marathon in Athens.
The next day we drove to San Sebastian and spent some time walking around the city, eating at a nice cafe, and then chilling at the beach. The sand was great, much softer than most of what we have in Barcelona. It was really quite cool, really foggy so you could hardly see very far down the beach or into the water at all. Emre loved it, he played in the shallow water a little and had a great time.
