Me looking puffy, bald and shiny at the start of the race.

Can I take a minute to talk about how horrible I look in any and all race photos? That picture is the one Matt got — the one they took of me starting is even worse. I’m lumbering forward with a half-asleep “Eff my life” look on my face, and my head looks so bald and shiny it could blind and bring down an airplane. Ugh.

Anyway, when it was my turn to start, I jogged up the steps like an excited idiot. That pace lasted me about seven flights of stairs before I started wheezing and huffing like a lifelong smoker. I started to get an annoying tickle in my throat and kept doing the annoying “Unghhhhh” throat clearing noise. After a ridiculously long time (17 minutes, 2 minutes slower than the posted “average racer time” — God, I suck), I emerged at the top to the Rocky theme song blasting from cheap speakers.

The top floor was a clogged mess of sweaty, stinky racers who were all coughing and hacking and sucking down bottles of water. I took a whiff of the poorly ventilated space and mentally thanked Mike for setting us up with an early morning race time — I can’t imagine what the floor would smell like at 2:30 pm. Matt and I waited for our non-racers to finish, and in between coughs and sniffles I glanced down at Matt’s bib and saw that he had specified a shirt size ’small’. Not remembering what I had filled out when I registered for the race months ago, I looked down at my own bib and noticed that I had requested a size medium.

“That’s weird,” I thought, “Why would I want that size?” I then noticed that my posted start time on the bib said 2:45. Finally, I checked the name and realized that I had raced the Big Climb as Abraham Kellogg. Whoops. It looks like the organizers stuffed the wrong bib into my envelope. I made the most of the situation and encouraged my teammates to call me Abe (“Abraham” is so formal, you know?). Thankfully, the race organizers must have noticed the mix up because the online results are displaying our correct times (I wish they hadn’t — Abe flew up those steps way faster than I did).

After the Climb, my team and I drove over to Salty’s and rewarded our good efforts with a ridiculous brunch buffet. I felt a bit guilty about stuffing my face with copious amounts of brunch items after having read Anthony Bourdain’s horror stories and cautionary tales about why Sunday brunches at restaurants are uber-skeezy (I’m in the middle of Kitchen Confidential), but oh well, even day-old food can still be pretty tasty.

So far my team has raised $2,638 for leukemia research. We exceeded our goal of $2,000 — huzzah! As for me, I managed to raise $1,365 (about half the team’s donations), thanks to my network of charitable friends and colleagues on Twitter. Thanks, everyone! I found out that people can still donate to the Big Climb through April 10th, and I also found out that if I single-handedly raise $2,000 I get invited to some top earners party, which is pretty cool. (Basically, what I’m trying to say is check out my donation page at http://www.llswa.org/goto/rebeccakelley and donate if you haven’t already–there’s still time!).

I had a lot of fun raising money and doing the Big Climb. I might do it next year so I can shave off some minutes and post a PR. The only shitty thing about the Big Climb is how frickin’ sick I got afterwards. I think the combination of Jason being sick all last week and me running up a narrow, poorly ventilated set of stairs and ultimately getting dumped into a room full of wheezing, coughing people and their mixture of germs culminated into a super virus that flew into my body and planted itself firmly in my throat and lungs. I sound like the love child of Kathleen Turner and Gollum, and I haven’t worked out since Monday’s swim class. Sigh.

Oh well. Hopefully I’ll heal up soon so I can get back on track with training. Boise keeps inching closer and closer…

(Yes, this is the little kid from Jerry Maguire. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have leukemia or lymphoma, but he is pretty spazzy looking so just imagine that he has Hodgkin’s and be overcome with a sudden urge to help out the kid who talks about 8-lb heads.)

That’s right, your favorite mediocre athlete is going to try and run up 69 flights of stairs. Me, aka the person incapable of running along a flat sidewalk without tripping. (This actually happened to me–I was running along 19th and looked down to skip a song on my iPod at the exact moment I came across a raised sidewalk groove. Before I knew it, I was flying forward and skidding my knee and hands on the hot, gritty concrete. I immediately snapped up and looked around to see if anyone noticed my blunder, and sure enough, there was a group of people staring at me from across the street with their mouths agape, silently mouthing (“silently” because OK Go was still blaring in my ears) “Are you OH-KAY?” I squeaked out a falsely cheerful and overly loud “YEAH! I’M FINE!” before scampering away as fast as I could, blood running down my leg.)

So yeah, jogging up a butt-ton of stairs can’t possibly lead to disaster for the clumsiest person in the Pacific Northwest…

Anyway, I pledged to try and raise $500, so I’d really appreciate some donations (think of it as a tip for serving up awesomely mediocre blog content). Check out my donation page at http://www.llswa.org/goto/rebeccakelley and donate some money if you like me, if you hate me but like science research, if you like me and hate leukemia, or if you hate me and want me to leave you alone. If you donate money, I promise to write an especially amusing and self-deprecating recap post about the Big Climb once I haul my ass out of bed and do the race on Sunday, March 22. I imagine the post will consist of about 30% race details and 70% post-race brunch recap.

Please donate! I also have a team page (we’re actually not Team Flabalanche, though I wish that were our name) in case you’re feeling especially charitable and want to donate more moolah, but at the very least I’d really appreciate anything you can contribute.