A few years ago I was at a Pub Trivia Night and one of the categories was “Dead or Alive?” The quizmaster gave a list of 10 celebrities and all we had to do was say if the person was dead or still alive. Sounds simple… except our team (and many teams around us) had vague recollections of one person definitely dying while another team member was 100% sure she was alive and kicking. And this happened throughout the list of names. Ultimately, when the answers were revealed, EVERY celebrity on the list was still with us – unlike the series finale of LOST, they were ALL ALIVE!
Wait… were they all dead on Lost? Some were, some weren’t? It was all purgatory? Aw, who knows? The “Walkabout” episode was great. So too was the one where Kate and Sawyer played “I Never.” But I digress…
A rather morbid pub trivia category therefore was revealed to be poetically uplifting and life affirming and showed us all that our memories weren’t what they could be and what’s more we should all call some old lost friends and tell them we loved them.
I’m not entirely sure why I thought about that pub trivia night during today’s Jacksonville Marathon. Perhaps because there’s been a downbeat throughline plaguing the last few months of blog posts. Maybe the point is that though there’s a lot wrong and time has taken its toll, maybe there’s still a little life left in this old geezer after all.
Part of it stemmed from the grizzled, disheveled, pudgy old man visage that greeted me this morning in the mirror at 2:30 AM.
I skipped shaving hoping the soon-to-be 5 AM shadow would distract from the Dick Tracy’s foe PruneFace I seem to have aged into and the heavy bags under my underslept eyes. So in the few photos I took along the way I look like the now much older, pudgier, and antithetical-maybe-I-was-adopted brother of Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett.
Spoiler alert — I finished the race.
All the above lame pop culture references are just distractions as I’m trying not to amble down the path of woe-is-me-lane. So please excuse the crudity and stream-of-popness of this post.
I’ve run Jacksonville before. The first time was in 2014. And then I ran it again in 2016 – I even wrote about that the ’16 race as one of the very first entries on this blog and you can read about it HERE.
So today was something of a rerun. A literal re-run. I recalled a few of the twists and turns, including the super cruel down and back 1 mile detour at 24 to get to the right distance for finishing on the Bolles School track. It was a crisp 50-ish degrees at the start and pretty ideal running weather throughout. I tried to focus therefore on the run and tried not to take too many photos… all the moreso as my tailbone cried out in pain starting around mile 13 and didn’t stop the dull throbbing pain until… well… it still hasn’t. So I was trying to just “git ‘r done” in sports movie parlance.
I saw my cushioned Boston Qualifying time ebb and flow… but in the end I did struggle across the finish line with a BQ time of 3:12:25.
According to the Boston Athletic Association,
“Qualifiers who were two minutes, nine seconds (2:09) or faster than the Qualifying time for their age group and gender were accepted into the 2017 Boston Marathon.”
So if that holds true for 2018, my cushion of 2:35 under the 3:15 qualifying time for my age would get me in.
And while the 2017 event had one of the biggest differentials, historically I still should be ok with this time if I do decide to go out for Boston one more time:
Again, per the BAA:
“For reference, Qualifiers needed to be two minutes, 28 seconds or faster for their age group and gender for the 2016 Boston Marathon; one minute, 02 seconds or faster for the 2015 Boston Marathon; and one minute, 38 seconds or faster for the 2014 Boston Marathon.”
And there is still my BQ time at Croatia if need be.
The good news, the life-affirming callback to that pub quiz category, is that in my last marathon of 2017 I was able to keep it together just long enough to garner a BQ. But… and there’s always a but… my butt hurts. There is a literal “butt” in this “but” instance, or what one might call this “butinsky.”
But to the but, that BQ *is* something positive to focus on amidst the pain, heartache, and malaise.
So… “yay?”
Yes. “Yay.”
Definitely “Yay.”
