It's been a while since Fresno, Toni bugging me for a marathon trip and so I picked this marathon to see something different.. a more midwestern town ....and hopefully with cooler weather than what we've been having here. You can't get to Des Moines from SJC airport without a stop ..this is kind of a drag but we made our connections ok.
We stayed in the "Savery" Hotel in downtown ..right next to the Expo (which was outdoors in tents in the park next to our hotel). (The woman that started this hotel used it to train the first set of WACs (women solders) for WW2.)
The temps were supposed to get to the 80's, sigh, and indeed they did. The course was not the greatest...it involved a bunch of loops...granted around a big lake and with trees here and there, but still..I would rather have seen the city via the run. IIRC correctly there were 1700 people at the race and only 700 full marathoners. Pretty small.
Me in the hotel room, at the expo and shot of the capitol building at night...
