Dinner and a Race

Last Thursday I took Maura into Boston to watch her mother run in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, her first road race ever. Before the race I took Maura to dinner using some money I had been given for my birthday.

As usual when we head into Boston we took the T from Quincy Adams station. We parked on level 2B in the garage. Someone always asks the question on the way home—2B or not 2B? It’s part of our ritual when we travel by T.

Maura and I left the subway at Copley Square and looked around for a restaurant. My first choice had closed since the last time I had been by so we went with my second choice, Fire and Ice, one of Maura’s favorites.  Fire and Ice features a buffet of raw ingredients that are cooked to order for you on a large grill. They always have a good selection of things to choose from, including meat and seafood, accompanied by a variety of sauces. The precise mix of ingredients on the buffet changes every day so the food is never the same from one visit to another. They almost always have shrimp though, which makes Maura happy.

To accompany our meal Maura and I had Lava Flows from the bar. A Lava Flow is a mixture of strawberry daiquiri and pina colada. Maura, of course, had the non-alcoholic version. I would have been happy with a touch more rum in mine.

After dinner we walked down to the starting line for the race, on Charles Street, by the Public Garden. We watched the start hoping to see Jennifer but could not pick her out of the crowd of 12,000. Once the last racer passed us we headed across the Public Garden to a spot near the finish line. We got to our new spot in time to see the leaders go by. We clapped for the first few hundred finishers, until they started coming in too close together to clap for each one. We did manage to spot Jennifer as she went by near the finish because the pack was not as thick as it was near the start.

Jennifer did fairly well for her first ever race and we’re proud of her. She finished around 7000^th (out of 12,000). Her time for the 3½ mile race was approximately 39 minutes.

After we’d seen her pass we went to our rendezvous point and met Jennifer to head home. She collected her stuff and we headed home. Because the race hadn’t started until 7:00 pm, the earliest that the City of Boston would close the streets for the course, it was a late night for Maura but it was fun for us and a big achievement for Jennifer.