It’s five-thirty on a Sunday morning. I woke before my alarm, pre-heated the oven, and showered before feeding the cats. In fact, the oven beeps to tell me it hit three-fifty as I walk back into the kitchen surrounded by the offended felines. I grab the tray of sausage biscuits – prepped the night before – from the fridge, shove them in the oven, and move towards the cat food.
It’s six-twenty when we hit the road, ten minutes earlier than planned. We drive towards a brilliant sunrise, but don’t take a photo because we know a phone camera from a moving vehicle won’t do it justice.
The packet pick-up runs until seven-thirty; we arrive just after seven. We park in our preferred area, the Lions section, and pick up our t-shirts and race bibs. There are people warming up in the parking lot as we drive in, but many others haven’t arrived yet. We change into our race shirts and drop our original shirts in the car before walking into the zoo itself.
I do my morning hip stretches on the floor of the Discovery Center, then we visit the promotional tables. If we had just picked up the Off the Eaten Path samples, I would have shoved them in my DuPage Medical Group ladybug bag. But Nicor Gas has energy saving kits for current customers, and I do actually want to replace my showerhead… so we walk back out to the car because the bag has gotten heavy. We skip the spin a wheel opportunities at the Cane’s and White Sox booths; I’m not a fan of either and the lines were long.
If you’ve entered Brookfield Zoo through the North Gate, you know it’s an extensive walk just to get from the gate to the parking lot. It was seven-thirty-five by this point, still most of an hour until the race started, and the theoretically closed packet pick-up has a huge line. We visit the bathroom and move towards the line-up, stopping at one booth we missed before. At this point, constant motion is key, so we’re fidgeting and semi-dancing to the music blaring over the speakers. Eventually, we move into the corral for the 12 minutes per mile and up group, the next to last group to start, just before the people with strollers.
Ten minutes after the official start time, our corral launches through the arch, bib sensors recording our individual starts. We start at a jog to get out of the crowd, then slow to a fast walk around the curve. We hold that fast walk in the light rain until the final stretch, as we come around the corner by the snow leopards and start to run the final leg. We’re both jogging until she sees me pull ahead; she sprints forward and I get stuck behind a stroller, grinning as she beats me to the finish line by at least ten seconds. We both accept the proffered water, banana, and Kind bar, and eventually decide that the line is too long for exact times; my watch says we walked the course in about fifty minutes.
It’s early enough that the zoo is largely deserted, so we head to Wild Encounters to meet the goats, wallabies, and parakeets. After all, part of the point of participating in the ZooRunRun is that we like the zoo.
