This was my second year running and pacing the 7 Bridges Marathon. Both years I have paced the 5:45 group and this year I paced by myself. This year was a lot warmer than last year hitting close to 80, and quite humid, but still had great views of the river, city, bridges, galore. I really enjoy this race and think it's especially good for a first time marathoner. It's rolling hills but generally pretty fast course. The race has several thousand runners but only a few hundred run the marathon. It was pretty quiet on most of the course, so having a larger marathon field with more crowd support is probably the one thing that would make this race better.

Pros:
- Parking/access - there's plenty of pay lots and street parking all around downtown Chattanooga. If you head to the start early you're more likely to find street parking which is free on Sundays. I was able to park for free right at the start/finish.
- Pace teams - I may be biased but I think we're pretty awesome.
- Expo - for a relatively small outdoor expo, they did a nice job with a dozen or so local vendors. They had a card you got marked at each vendor to then be eligible for a raffle prize.
- Swag - very cool, gender specific race shirt, hat, towel, HUGE medal
- LOTS of bathrooms at the start
- Post race waffles - duh
- Aid stations every mile is a nice benefit. Each station was pretty small, but they were well stocked. I took a star off for this because they had very few volunteers and it appeared many of them had never worked an aid station at a race before. Bless their hearts.

Cons:
-Aid station volunteers were very nice but not so great at actually handing out aid. Most of them were high school kids so I guess this makes sense. :-)