MONSOON ?!?!??!??

It started to rain on Friday, and it finally stopped about halfway through Sunday! I've only seen rain like this during the rainy season in South Korea!

At 5am on Saturday, I hit the snooze button wondering even at that point, was I actually going to ride? Yes. I couldn't let down our Dictateur Sportif (J). I wasn't even the first one to make it to the bike shop in the rain. In fact, 5 other people showed up to the ride. Sometimes, our feet were actually underwater while we peddaled through "puddles." (Small ponds and lakes) We yelled good morning at the bizzarely large quantities of running squads. Jeff, owner of Metropolis, comes by our table to ask, really? - Yes, really. Kevin bought himself some kind of banana cream pie on our coffee break: we were living it up. We didn't even go that slow? Probably averaged around 16.5-17mph which is on par with dry days.

Later that day, Priya came to visit! Yay :) We treated ourselves to bubble tea at Joy Yee's in China Town before eating large quantities of delicious middle eastern foods for dinner at Cedar's Mediterranean Kitchen in Hyde Park. It was really great just being able to chat the way we would during our fantastic once a week dinners during school.

Today was the half marathon, and my dad ran with 16,000+ other people in the pouring rain! Yikes. He just made it under 2 hours too, by 30 seconds! Awesome. He passed by just as Priya and I looked away from the course for about 30 seconds ... oops. And then we accidentally cut it really close with her bus, but my mom promised she'd get back to Champaign even if she had to drive her down. Haha, that would have been quite the adventure.