Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning

So my friends were all like "We're doing this pub run on Saturday morning, you should join us!"  I was thinking "Wait, when does it start?"  Turns out it started at 8 AM.  I'm like "Do I look like I went to a school with a Division I football program?  I never gotten up early just so I could start drinking!"

But I signed up for the Baltimore Running St. Patrick's Day Pub Run (not to be confused with any 5k events) and it was a great decision.  First of all, it's a "variable distance race."  That is, there are some bars you're supposed to visit, but there's no course and there's no specific order that you're supposed to visit the bars.  They get everyone lined up at the start and say "Go!"  Then a mass of people (like a >100 people) just start running through Fells Point (we started at Slainte).  Everyone's running down different streets, wearing green shirts, wearing Guinness beads... it's unlike any race you've considered running.

So you run to some bars, but they're not actually open.  Instead, they have a table set up like a water station at a real race with beer cups on it.  The stations had Natty Boh mostly, but also some Guinness.  My personal favorite was the fact that they had water bottles full of Irish whiskey.  So you squirt a shot of Jamison in your mouth, chase it with a beer, and then start jogging again.  You do it with your friends, so you're not running too fast.  Plus there's a bunch of other people running around the city doing this too.

I generally had at least a beer at each stop and usually a little whiskey.  A couple stops had Bailey's in water bottles too (my friend made himself a small Irish car bomb at one stop).  We generally know our way around Baltimore, so even if we didn't know the bar, we could figure out a good way to get there based on the address.  So we were pretty efficient, our race was 5.86 miles long, but it took us 66:14 (11:18 pace) to run because we hit all the stops to drink and we jogged nice and slow.

Seriously, it was so much fun.  I actually refused to believe that we'd gone 5 miles, it just seemed to fly by (especially because we ran to the furthest bar and worked our way back).  At the end, they gave us a free Guinness at the bar (which, if you're willing to pay a little money, can easily become an Irish car bomb).  If you live in Baltimore, you should absolutely run this "race" next year!