Race Report: Poland Springs Marathon Kickoff

I’m getting so blasé about races, I’m forgetting to bring my camera. So no funny pictures of people from behind, which always happens, right? And pretty soon all the race pictures start to look the same. It’s like sports highlight footage on the news, they could show five seconds of somebody catching a ball from last year and it would look exactly the same as the footage that was taken this afternoon. And it’s also like that generic video of obese people from the neck down, walking down the street, always shown when there’s some study published about overweight America… they could reuse those pictures for years, and we’d never know. So you know the one I plopped in (above) is from some other race this year. Hey, at least I’m honest.

Today’s race was a 5-miler, and it was a preview of the last couple of miles of the NYC Marathon next Sunday. Thousands come out for it, and the Central Park drives are jammed beyond belief, so the first two miles end up being a slow jog for practically everyone. It’s a big pain in the ass, especially because at least a fifth of the runners are wearing headphones and blasting the Theme to ‘Rocky’ between their ears and can’t and don’t want to hear anybody else. Unlike Chicago, here headphones aren’t outlawed, just ‘strongly discouraged’, so we can only hope those iPod batteries die sooner than normal on the NYC Marathon course.

My 5-mile time was OK, but it felt like it was about an hour off my PR. Then again, as NYRR prez Mary Wittenberg said before the starting gun, ‘if you’re running the marathon, you shouldn’t be racing today’. True enough.

So we finished at Tavern on the Green, and got our Poland Springs water and bagel and that was that. It had started at 8AM, so getting home by 9:30 was rather nice; unlike the marathon, it didn’t feel like we’d spent the whole day traipsing all over kingdom come.

This all came on the heels of this week’s marathon organizers’ e-mail to participants ‘strongly advising’ them to find alternate travel methods to get to the upcoming marathon start. That means an alternative to the bus diaspora from midtown. Taking the bus costs an extra $20, and most runners already bought their ticket when they registered, and now they tell us not to take their very own buses if we actually want to get to the start in Staten Island on time. The delay is caused by ongoing construction on the Verrazano Bridge that won’t be finished in time, so everybody is mildly screwed.

As for me, it will all work out, this week’s foreign policy is all about being blasé. Like the weather, I refuse to get angry about something I have no control over. I’ll always get cranky about certain things, but after running the Chicago Marathon, I feel like every race is a fun run anyway.