A relay runner in the third annual 26.2-mile Boston Marathon in Iraq crosses the finish line April 14 at Camp Adder, Iraq.

This blog is a bit late, I know, but I was a bit busy this week and still wanted to fill you in on how my weekend went.

As I said before, the third annual Boston Marathon in Iraq was held here at our base early Saturday morning. It kicked off at 5 a.m., so I set my alarm for an hour and a half earlier, giving me enough time to wake up, shower, shave and get dressed.

I had to be at the race site extra early in order to meet up with two fellow Army journalists who had secured a vehicle so we could zip around to different spots along the route and get the shots we needed. However, the photo we were banking the whole morning on – runners passing by the Ziggurat of Ur temple – turned out to be a bust.

Being so early, it was pitch dark outside for the first third of the race. The lead runner was expected to reach the Ziggurat within 30 minutes, so that was our first stop. We arrived to find that not a single high-powered lamp had been set up at the site and the only illumination sources we had were the high beams of our four-wheel Gator and pocket flashlights. From what I hear, the halfway point of the race was lit up like a theater stage, but no such luck for a 4,000-year-old place of worship.

Anyway, what ended up happening was all 300-plus runners ended up passing us by before the sun had even thought about considering the possibility of coming over the horizon, and all of our photos were dark, blurry and unusable. So we headed back to the finish line and waited for everyone to come back.

The overall winner of the race was the same guy who has won every running event since I’ve been here: 1st Lt. Elias Gonzales, a Florida National Guard soldier who finished with a time of 2:35:50. The first-place female finisher was Staff Sgt. Jennifer Yurczk, who came in at 3:34:39.

The next evening, we hosted a simultaneous Iraq-Minnesota dinner where we were treated to thick grilled steaks that had been donated to us, and a few soldiers in the unit had the chance to see and talk to their families via a live video teleconference. (Picture at left: Sgt. 1st Class Timothy Knoblach flips a set of steaks
during the St. Paul-to-Iraq Steak Fry April 15 at Camp Adder, Iraq.)

Dinner started at about 8 p.m. local Iraq time (it was lunch time in Minnesota), but since our office was in charge of setting up cameras, a projector screen, a satellite and all sorts of other audiovisual equipment, our day began a bit earlier. It was a nice reward to sit down and enjoy a delicious meal after two and a half hours of taking photos and cueing a line of soldiers to speak into a microphone, wave and ignore the time delay.

Now I’m just counting the days until I’m in Japan ...