1:56:03! In pictures!

The Joe Photo pix are in from Sunday's 13.1 Marathon (which, for those of you just joining us, is foo-foo gay marketingspeak for "half marathon"). After last month's Soldier Field Ten Mile no-photographic-evidence-that-Jake-even-participated debacle, I made sure my bib number was completely unobstructed every time I saw a photographer in this race. And I was rewarded with about 10 pictures ... most of which make it look like my shorts are being eaten alive by my ravenous man-crotch.

Thankfully, I'm too cheap to actually buy the photos. And in this one I stole off the web site, my ravenous man-crotch is obscured (albeit in a big zero) by the photographers' do-not-steal-this-photo-and-post-it-on-your-blog watermark:

The run was fabulous—the weather was perfect, the crowd was nicely spaced out thanks to an organized program of starting waves, and I was numbed by a handful of Ibuprofen so I was able to beat my best half marathon time by a whopping 15 minutes without realizing I was completely destroying my IT bands. To pass the time in a long run, I sometimes do mileage-related math in my head (when I'm not singing show tunes, of course). But I'm not always a clear thinker when I'm under physical duress, and though I thought I was on par to beat my time by 20 minutes, which would have qualified me for a fast-person start corral in the Chicago Marathon this fall, I realized in mile 11 that my math had been off once again and I had to run the last two miles in 7 minutes each to qualify. And for an 8:30-pace runner on a good day, 7-minute miles are as laughable as Obama's "fierce advocacy" for gay equality. But I thought I'd give it an Ibuprofen-numbed try anyway and I sprinted as fast as my rapidly deteriorating IT bands would carry me. And here I am approaching the finish line a full 16 minutes later, which put me comfortably on the fast side of my heretofore-unbroken 2:00 wall but still 4:04 too slow to qualify for a starting corral:

But my shorts look normal and I didn't pay a cent for the photos and I did get an impressive new personal best out of the run. So I'm not going to complain about my time. Much.