Pint Night at Fleet Feet Lincoln Square

So I was finally able to join my fellow bloggers who make up the Wurst Running Club Ever for Pint night up at Fleet Feet in Lincoln Square.  I snuck out of work early and got lucky with traffic.  I got home and changed real quick and hydrated a bit before racing for the brown line.  I learned the first rule of Pint night is not to show up on time apparently.  I arrive at pretty much 6:30PM if not a minute before.  Shortly after Declan showed up and even though we never met before there was the recognition from the back and forth on the blogs and reddit.  Soon after Anne, Mo, and her boyfriend showed up.

We chatted a bit and I shuffled nervously as I'm not as familiar with the group as everyone else.  I broke the ice with Mo by reminding her we talked about Rock n Roll Vegas which we both plan on rocking - or maybe rolling depending on how much we eat come November.  We wondered where Maggie and Pete were at when Maggie finally popped in the door.  She brought along the Wurst shirts ever for our 5K on Thursday.  The Fleet Feet guys made some announcements and off we went.  Wait, where's Pete?  We ran into him outside on Lincoln Ave about a half block down.  We're trying to corral him into the group run and he's trying to take our pictures.

It was a nice run through the neighborhood.  I wasn't real familiar with anything except for the area around where they have Maifest so I followed the group.  We chatted about various things, made jokes, and only got delayed (temporarily lost) once.  Once we hit the turnaround point we took a group photo.

We even let a random join the fun

On the way back Pete and Declan took off.  I wasn't sure if I should keep up or hang back... I stayed back.  I wound up talking to J since we are both MSU grads (Go Green!) and found that we graduated the same year after we both took victory laps.  We wound up getting a bit ahead of the girls, but still way behind those speedsters.  We had a bit of an interesting moment when back near the Maifest area a car wasn't paying attention and basically ran a stop sign and nearly hit one of the runners in front of us.  He stopped as the girl just barely jumped out of the way and then glared at us as the rest of the runners decided to go and make him sit there awhile.  He's lucky he didn't hit the girl, plenty of witnesses to make sure he got what he deserved.

We got back to Fleet Feet and grabbed our gear and headed down to the Grafton.  Once we got there we found out our free beer was going to be draft only.  Apparently some people may have taken advantage of the any beer free policy previously.  Some people are just the Wurst aren't they?  I settled on a Guinness since the night had a bit of a chill to it and seemed appropriate.  We hung out and chatted and talked about training and race plans and whatnot.  I ordered food, or at least I thought I did.  It never came.  The waitress finally checked on me when the others were mostly done.  I had ordered a buffalo chicken sandwich that she forgot to put in... I wound up with buffalo chicken tenders, but the waitress didn't charge me so I'm not one to complain.  Declan lost his man card by drinking a cider and following it up with a chicken mango salad.  I hope Anne takes care of it better than Declan ;)

After parting ways I found the most appropriate picture ever at the brown line stop on my way home.

Insert sausage joke here
-That's what she said!