We took a super early flight to Washington DC so we could make the most of our first day there. Once we landed, we took a taxi straight to our hotel to drop off our suitcases and headed to the Nike Women's Half Marathon DC Expotique. There were a ton of volunteers that helped us make our way through the tents to pick up my race packet and shirt. Once all of the important stuff was out of the way, we were directed outside for a photo opp with the huge We Run sign in the courtyard.
After striking a pose in my race shirt, we walked down to the water to the big Expotique tent with all of the sponsor booths and giveaways.
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| Expotique entrance. |
The entrance of the tent was set up to read the chip in each runner's race bib and a personalized welcome message popped up on the big video screen for everyone.
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| The video welcome screen. |
After everybody snapped a picture of their name up in lights, we were directed to the counter to receive a little reward for the miles we had logged on the Nike+ app during our training.
Everywhere I turned there was some kind of eye candy - a video wall streaming the lastest social media posts or the half marathon course up in lights on the wall. The music was great and all of the volunteers were so nice and seemed genuinely excited to be there.
After I'd taken about a million pictures of the first part of the Expotique, we made our way over the the sponsor booths. Nuun and Luna were giving out all kinds of product samples and runners could have their hair styled at the Paul Mitchell booth.
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| Luna let runners and their fan clubs print out custom race day signs. |
As we made our way out of the tent, there was a big signing wall for runners to write their name and a little message of encouragement.
The Nike Georgetown store was just up the street so we made the small uphill hike so we could find my name on the wall of runners and do a bit of shopping.
I spent a small fortune on race merchandise and we decided that since we were already in Georgetown we should make a day of it and walk around the neighborhood. We climbed the stairs from the Exorcist and strolled by cute little brick townhomes, including one where the Kennedys lived.
We also had our first Sprinkles Cupcakes experience! I had the dark chocolate cupcake with sprinkles and I like to think of it as pre-race carb loading.
