Camera Stormin'

Sunday morning started off kind of bleary. There was so much rain in the past week that I was just hoping that it wouldn't be a crazy storm like in the past few days. If you're one of my out-of-state readers, Wisconsin has had a lot of severe weather this June including a tornado that took out most of the town of Eagle. Regardless of the weather, I jumped in my car and headed to Veteran's Park.

Brainstorm 2010 was super humid and the air was so thick with moisture that it felt like you were swimming. Uh oh. Humid = not fun running/breathing. Fortunately, there was a good breeze going.

The Epilepsy Foundation had excellent signage, so it was easy to find the tents. I checked in with the team check in and then found Melissa and the rest of the Jay-Walkers. (Go back a few blog posts to read about Melissa's brother Jason). So far, the EF also had the coolest t-shirts. See?

How fun are those shirts? This picture is of me and Melissa, who organized our team of her family and friends, before the weather went berserk. I should also tell you that for this race, I decided to test and see if my camera's claim of "waterproof" was true and I ran with it in my hand the whole time.

Here we're headed to the start line. I'd guess about 300 people showed up to run or walk:

These next two photos were about 800-1000 meters into the race (3/4 mile):

This is about 3K into the race when I thought "Hey self, you're taking pictures of other people, why don't you take a photo of yourself?":

These two photos were shortly after the self shot about 3.5K into the race. I've only got a mile to go and it is starting to rain. And was that thunder?

See those clouds out there? Yeah, thunder and lightning happened about a minute or two later! I looked back for a second to take this really blurry photo of (L-R) Discovery World and the Milwaukee Art Museum:

This exceptionally blurry shot is of Melissa, her husband Bill and his friend from college whose name I don't know (I think it was Dan?). I made it around the final turn first (which has never happened before), so I decided to try and capture them with the camera:

Since I finished first for my team (!!!), I stayed at the finish to take their pictures. Here's Bill and Melissa:

At the turnaround, which was about 1-1.2K from the end, it was raining so hard that I had to stare at the ground and could only look up and blink to be able to see. There was lighting and thunder and my shoes were squishing! Brainstorm lived up to it's name!

Thank you to everyone who donated $$ to help our team! We raised $505.00! Thank you!