Whenever I find myself on the West Coast, I try and hit the Monday night trivia at this local British pub. During a game interlude, they call up players from each time to compete in a “quarters” contest to try and win a round of drinks. My team, a rotating band of usual and unusual suspects, is usually stellar in so many ways but we all kinda suck at “quarters.” I don’t know if it’s because we didn’t pledge frats in college (albeit one guy went to Eton… ETON! I suppose they only played “krugerrands”). Or if it’s just performance anxiety before the unusually attractive emcee. But as we whinge about not wanting to be the sacrificial lamb, somebody eventually takes one for the team… quite literally as it’s a humiliating experience to go up to the front of the bar and attempt to bounce George Washingtons into a shot glass. We all kinda suck but I think I’m the worst of the worst.
I was reminded of that humiliated feeling this morning as I ran the “Blast the Coastline Marathon.” It was down in Long Beach using a boardwalk/running path that I’ve been on before with other running groups (I’m 99% sure I did a race here with A Better World Running… albeit they started in a slightly different spot). I’m terrible at planning for traffic so when I checked last night for directions, I neglected to factor in I’d most likely have minimal cars on the road at 4:45 AM. So despite budgeting an hour and a half because I checked around 7 PM at night, it really only took about 45-50 minutes. One has to love the CA freeways late at night/early in the morning. You really can get around this place in reasonable amounts of time. Too bad there are so many people trying to do so during normal waking hours.
I got to the beach around 5:40 AM and was told there was an early start at 5:30 but I had just missed it. But the Charlie Alewine Racing team were super nice and said if I wanted to be responsible for my own time I could start anytime and not have to wait around for 50 minutes for the official start. Given the temperatures were projected to climb into the 90s as the day progressed, I thought I’d take them up on it.
It’s a bit of a bummer not to have the whole runner energy vibe just before an official start but one does what one does.
The race itself was a 4 loop, out and back course along the California Coastal Trail, a bike path/pedestrian walkway that runs along the beach and marina and affords a soothing crashing ocean wave diegetic soundtrack.
Herein lies the quarters humiliation. I was trying to redeem myself from the crash and burn of the later stages of Madagascar… and I was really hoping to get a great run in as a morale booster for the Moonshot at the end of the month. I wasn’t looking to break any PRs or course records or any of that — I just was looking to go out and keep it under 3:30 as a way to say to myself, “Hey! You got this!”
And for the first quarter, I was doing ok. I got back just in time to see the official start of the event and quickly was overtaken by fresh legged runners who were gazelle-ian. One woman was pacing a friend of hers to a segment and then took off, telling her she’d high five her along the way. The second woman and I fell into a cadence for the next few miles and I found out this was her first half marathon. She was crushing it; her friend was a senior out at the Iowa college she was going to start at in the fall as a freshman. I felt incredibly old when I realized this woman was born the year after I graduated UNC. Nonetheless, it was fun to chat and pass the miles with her for as long as I could. On my third loop, her second, she broke away and cruised down the course. I couldn’t keep up and this is where the quarters came home to miss the proverbial shot glass repeatedly.
Somewhere in this third quarter I just lost it. Mentally, physically, emotionally. I was just broken. The sun was rising and the temperatures were sweltering… albeit far less than I’ve had to deal with in the past. But I just felt like every step required two as my bowl full of jelly belly jiggled and jangled — this weight issue is apparently a real issue and not just in my head. I also felt nauseous and spent, though I really don’t know how I could’ve been dehydrated as I was careful to guzzle H20 and even a glass or two of full strength Gatorade at the turnarounds.
Hell, I even stopped for a water fountain drink along the beach route — my brother and I rank such things and this one while warm due to being in the direct sun, tasted just fine and was a much needed refreshment. I’d give it a 7 with an S… S as in “savior.”
There was so much walking in the 3rd and 4th loops. I just couldn’t seem to put together much of any momentum or inertia to carry me home. That’s not a criticism of the support station at the loop start/turnaround or the other runners or even the course itself. The folks were great, the course was mostly flat (save for one small, little incline near a pier – a molehill that felt like a mountain) and honestly the event itself was just fine. *I* just didn’t have it in me.
On top of that, there’s no photos to post here because, well, my touchscreen iPhone no longer likes to be touched (story of my life! Zing!) The LCD capacitor or whatever that glass covering on the front of the phone that we all wipe against our pant leg to try and remove the fingerprints will not recognize my digits. It was in my pocket as I ran, something I’ve done literally hundreds if not thousands of times with my training regimen. But for some reason on this day, which while hot, was far from the worst conditions I’ve ever carried it in, for some reason today was the day that the sweat, the sea salt air, or whatever else was going on in Long Beach broke the screen’s responsiveness. It’s not cracked… it’s just… unresponsive. Text messages would still pop up on the screen albeit I couldn’t swipe to read them. This all happened somewhere around Mile 18… and it never got better.
So there are no photos taken post mile 18… and there’s no way to retrieve what few photos I snapped along the way prior to that as the phone is “locked” and cannot be unlocked … not even to access it via iTunes or as a hard drive on my computer to copy over the photos. Why? Because I can’t punch in the numbers. Somebody online suggested using an Apple lLightning to USB adapter and plugging in a USB keyboard but I don’t have one of those anymore. Ironically I DID have one before a great tech purge last year. Sigh… always wrong, rarely right. That’s me.
In the end, I stumbled over the finish line and sighed a heavy, defeated sigh. The support team were wonderful and the full-bodied Gatorade was perfectly mixed (rare at races – it’s usually disgustingly overmixed yellow… this was a potent and thirst quenching cherry). I rehydrated as best I could and got back into my car for the lonely drive home.
I had great plans of getting the car smog inspected but had no means to find a place as my phone was incapacitated. I can’t believe how reliant I am on that stupid thing.
Having returned home, I called Sprint but in order to upgrade I need to pay off the lease AND pay an end of lease fee (?!) which totals close to $500. Five Hundred Dollars… that’s 58.89% of the letter “I”!
So now I’ve drowned the phone in a tupperware container of rice to see if I can dry it out and resurrect it… but in doing so, I’ve inadvertently jammed a piece of rice into the charging port and made that a possible repair issue as well.
Always wrong, rarely right yet again.
Always. Wrong.
So I’m playing the percentages, much as I did with the quarter loops above. This is no doubt wrong but you have to choose a path. If I go to Apple to get the screen replaced, they’ll most likely wipe the phone for security purposes and I’ll lose the photos for good. If I use uBreakiFix again, the folks who did the repair the last time I had a broken screen, I run the risk of it failing like this one did after 5 months… but they won’t wipe the phone because I suspect they’re a Russian mob front and are sending all my info back to Mother R… which they’re welcome to do as honestly if Vladimir Putin wants to see me near tears along the Long Beach coastline, he’s welcome to them… provided I get to see that as well.
And so I wait for the sun to set, the rice to fail as the sun rises tomorrow, and my drive out to a strip mall repair place in the hopes of getting a working phone once more.
I await the wrongness to rain down once more.
***
Post Post Publish Script: Steve Heisler Photography was on the course and snapping away. Here are a few watermarked shots. If I can’t recover my photos, maybe I’ll buy a few of these:
