Big House Big Heart Photos

My usual Staff Photographer and Support Crew was not on hand at Sunday's Big House Big Heart 5K race so I had to rely on being randomly captured by the official event photographers. As far as I can tell, the person who was stationed at the final turn before the 50-yard dash to the finish had to swap memory cards right when I went by (one set of photos ends with a guy whose gun time was 29:12 and the next set picks up with a kid whose gun time was 29:54...my gun time was 29:43, nice, eh?) but I was captured at the finish in all my polka-dot headbanded glory.

Notice the common runners' facial expression of "eyeballing chip-timing mat in order to stop watch at the exact right moment."

The Big House: holy ground. I'm not talking about my rear.

Please ignore the large, unsightly construction sprouting like a toxic fungus on the east side of stadium. Said construction is creating the Big House's first luxury suites (aka "rich alumni and corporate bigwig schmooze palaces") the inside of any of which I am sure I will never see. Additionally, the stadium remodel is reducing the total number of seats in the formerly Biggest House, thereby making it the Not-So-Big House, or perhaps the Second-Biggest House. I believe Penn State's stadium is currently bigger, and if we don't watch out, the ohio state Horseshoe will overtake us as well.

The Wikipedia entry for the Big House states "The largest crowd in NCAA college football history was 112,118 on November 22 2003 for a game against Ohio State." I was at that game. We won. It was awesome beyond belief.