I’m running a marathon in the morning.

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

🙂

Favorite photo ever!

Also, best roommates ever. 🙂

Theodora, Bobbi, Kelly, and I stayed up way too late last night chatting, laughing, and just being girls. We are all so pumped for this race, you can feel the energy overflowing between us. 🙂

All the excitement kept us up late, but luckily we were able to all sleep in. Waking up at 7:30 on a Saturday? I’ll take it. 🙂

4 showers, 4 blow dryers, and 4 straighteners/ blow dryers later we were on our way to Jumba Juice to meet a couple of lovely blogging runners for breakfast.

Brie and Leslie were unable to make the pre-planned meet up this afternoon, so we arranged to meet them for breakfast. Brie is a beautiful blogging inspiration who will be running Chicago with Team in Training in honor of her late father and Leslie is another beautiful blogging inspiration who I’ve had the honor of meeting up with on several occasions and was so happy I could hang out with her this morning.

I was all set to order my usual Chunky Strawberry Topper when this sign caught my eye.

Pumpkin Smash? Ummm…. YES PLEASE!! 🙂

I ordered a large and asked for a healthy serving of granola on top.

So. Freakin. Good. I must have been a pretty annoying person to eat breakfast with this morning because I kept going on and on about how great my breakfast was. It’s a shame we don’t have Jamba Juices in Orlando…or that pumpkin is only around for a short time. :/

After breakfast we said out good byes to Brie, Leslie, and Bobbi and headed to the Sears Tower (which I guess is now called the Willis Tower) with my twin bro.

There was a wee bit of a line to get to the top.

P.S. I was rockin the official Meals & Miles Shirt today…. you know you want to order your own. 😉

The line for the skydeck actually moved pretty quickly. We waiting in total about 45 minutes? They kept the line interesting with lots of random facts about the tours and kept it interactive by quizzing people as they waited.

Do you know how long an elevator takes to go up 103 floors? 60 seconds!

Ding!

We lucked out with a gorgeous 360 degree view of the city. 🙂

The sybox had to be the scariest thing ever. Mom – you would NOT have liked this at all.

We weren’t sure what to have for lunch when we happened to run into a Giordano’s right outside of Willis Tower. True, we just had pizza the night before, but who were we to turn down another chance to try some Chicago deep dish (this time stuffed style).

With a good 35 minutes to wait for pizza, we ordered some garlic bread to calm our growling tummies.

PIZZA!

We split the Ulta Veggie Stuffed Pizza. It was STUFFED with olives, spinach, peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

I’m not a fan of calzones and for some reason when people kept mentioning stuffed pizza I was picturing a dry, bready calzone. However, this was not the case. This pizza was very wet and very saucy. Yum! The pizza was good, but the crust – oh, the crust! – it was divine! It was thick, doughy, and absolutely delicious. 🙂

I had a slice (and some crust from another slice) with a little bit of the side salad.

Here is my latest rankings of Chicago Pizza:

1. Gino’s East
2. Giordano’s
3. Lou Malnati’s

Ginos is still winning, but Giordano’s was a close second. 🙂

After pizza came dessert!

I had organized a little Frozen Yogurt meet up with some fellow bloggers/tweeters/readers in the Chicago area at Yogen Fruz. We ate, we talked, we obbsessed over the Marathon. 🙂

I ordered a small Chai Tea Latte. It was oddly tart, but I kind of liked it that way.

Good luck Girls! You ladies will rock it tomorrow! 🙂

Bean time!

How can you go to Chicago and not visit the bean? I know I just saw it in August, but there’s no shame in seeing it again and again. 🙂

These are the feet of a marathoner 🙂

Dinner was very casual this evening. We didn’t want to have to mess with reservations or have to wait hours for a table. Instead we took Matt’s suggestion and took a cab to The Pasta Bowl in Lincoln Park.

The menu was simple, cheap, and just what we needed. I ordered a veggie pasta with bow ties and bread.

It filled me up. I think I’m ready to go!

Oh My God. Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God.

It’s almost marathon time!!

I wish I had time to put together a lovely sentimental post about my journey to Chicago, but I just plain ran out of town. If you’re new to the blog you will just have to trust me it was a long one that was full of struggles, successes, and great times.

I registered for Chicago last April and in less than 12 hours I will be setting out for 26.2 miles of glory.

Wish us luck!!!!

Oh, and follow me on twitter. I’ll be running with my phone and I may or may no be prompted to tweet!

Good Night!