More hugging

Finished, went to the convention centre to change out of my sweaty gear and put on a tank top, a long sleeved shirt, a long sleeved fleece and the hoodie.  Dude.  It was so facking cold.  Jen and I went to grab a coffee and we went down to the end of the race to see Sherry and Yvonne come in.
Yvonne was on the faster team and had left before Sherry, though I did give it and brought my 12k in in one hour.
Yvonne.  She was so nice.  She ran the Edge to Edge when I did and it was her very first marathon.  So she has been running for a while and she's done a marathon but this chick didn't sleep at all the night before the race.  She was running the last leg and she was anxious.  It probably kicked in around lunch time and it just got worse as the day wore on and she started to worry about her leg.
At any rate, she's crossing the finish line and a lot of us were there and we are all screaming at the top of our lungs and she was just so resolute and determined and focused: she had no idea we were there.
It was like the Scotiabank half that Michael ran this year when I stepped off the curb and walked as far into the running path as I could and screamed at him as he passed by like five feet from me and he didn't know I was there.
And, though we had been as far as twenty minutes behind this team, Sherry rocked up roughly two minutes after Yvonne did and she heard us screaming and gave us a big smile and a thumbs up and we brought both teams in under 8 hours.
Hugs all around and then I heard someone else calling my name and it was Julie and Glenn who had run the entire 80 kilometres and I got hugs from them and it was just the nicest finish to be there with so many new people and people that I've known for a few years now and to be able to see the full cycle of anxiety and anxiousness to excitement to pride and massive blisters.
It was definitely an interesting weekend. I had been on the fence about going for a number of reasons, but having done it once?  I would do it again.
And there are a couple of things that did stand out in mind: I had agreed to do this run at a point in my life where I felt very alone. I thought I was about to be heading down a very lonely road in my life and I wanted a distraction.  And yet when I got up there I bumped into a bunch of people that I knew that wanted to hug me and talk to me and genuinely see how I was doing.  And within 24 hours of meeting them people doing the relay with me I had already bonded and formed some camaraderie with them to the point that I was happy to see them when I finished my run and they were so pleased and supportive of me.
The other funny bit was that, after asking after me, all of my friends asked where Michael was.  I think, to some degree, word had made it through the running clinic (vis a vis the useless waste of time that is Facebook) that Michael and I had broken up.  And yet tonight when a bunch of us runners went for dinner another runner put it to us point blank and asked "what's this I hear about you guys breaking up?".
I rather like that people might have been aware of it but didn't believe it and continued to ask how he was.  There was even some incredulity when we were asked about it tonight and that makes me feel good that Michael and I seem to have some sort of relatively invincible bastion of relationship solidarity.
Which, in a very strong and fundamental sense, we do.