What an awesome event!  Its been a few days now since the race, so my muscles are finally starting to feel normal again haha.  
The morning of the race we got up and left at around 8:00 (the race didn't start till 9:30!) and went to take the bus to the start, only to find out that all the roads were already closed.  There were all sorts of people parked along the road right outside our residence, hiking up the mountain with baguettes and such.  We ended up just running to the start as it's only about 3.5 miles away.  It was unbelievable how many people were at the start!  I found out later that 15,000 people ran the race.  It was pretty fun though, with about 10 minutes to go before the start everyone started cheering and chanting and just going wild!  Laurent Jalabert was there as well, so it was pretty cool to see him.  Finally the race started and about 5 minutes later we made it across the line.  The whole first half of the race was basically composed of zig-zagging through all the people, trying to find gaps in the crowd.  I felt really good running too, felt strong on the way up the Col de la Gineste, then started to fade with about 5K to go.  The top of the climb was at the 10K point, and I didn't realize how much further it was from there to the finish in Cassis.  It went by really quickly, though, and before long Cassis was in view and we made the steep decent into the very picturesque vacation town by the sea.  The last 5K was wild as there were people just jammed packed along the sides of the road, in some places even 3 or 4 people deep!  It was like running through a wall of sound.  These fans get really into it here!  Finally after making the most circuitous route around the city we made our way to the finish line right by the beach.  I finished in 1:39:13.  I was definitely pleased with that, considering the amount of climbing in the race.  All in all, it was a fantastic day.  We went swimming in the ocean for a little while after the race, then caught the bus back to Marseille.
The race itself was really a cool event.  Just seeing the amount of people running and the amount of people cheering on the road was amazing. There was even a helicopter filming the entire race, check out the videos here:
http://mediterranee.france3.fr/marseille-cassis/index.php?page=article&numsite=164&id_article=143&id_rubrique=2090



Anyway, just wanted to fill you all in on how the race went.  We all had a lot of fun!
Other than that, not much new news here, other than a riot downtown on Sunday.  They cancelled a soccer match between Marseille and Paris because 3 of the Paris players had swine flu.  So what do they do?  Riot, naturally.
The weather has been absolutely beautiful here these last few days so I think today we're going to take one last trip to the Calanques for some swimming and cliff jumping!
Talk to you all soon,
Chris