It’s a small world after all.
Twenty years ago this December I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill. And even with that multi-year experience in my past, I forget how pretty North Carolina is as a state. This race in the Blue Mountains brought up a lot of blasts from the past (that two story Wendy’s in Boone — Harper and I went there one Easter weekend when a bunch of our native Tar Heel friends went home to visit their families). It also was a prime reminder of why though I was not a Tar Heel born, I am assuredly a Tar Heel bred.
It’s also a small world because while waiting for the start of the race, I was called over by Jeanne and Richard Holmes. They’re folks I last saw in Kathmandu; they’ve since been a number of places near and far and have a number of far flung places on tap in their calendars. Jeanne said she enjoyed my blog post about the Urban Marathon so that was always nice to hear. I failed to grab a snapshot of her but I did get her husband and fellow Marathon Globetrotter “Cowboy Jeff” (AKA Robert Bishton… why he’s Cowboy ‘Jeff’ I’ve never figured out).
I also ran into Bob Kennedy of Fifty Sub 4 fame (though neglected to grab a selfie). I did however run for a few miles with fellow Mainly Marathoner Kristen Jarembeck, a super fast runner who I wound up trailing for a good deal of the race — you’ll see her way, way, WAY off in the distance in a few of the photos along the course.
No, the below photo isn’t a result of my running SO fast that conventional cameras failed to capture a sharp image. The humidity would occasionally take a toll and dollops of water would obscure the lens of my camera — resulting in such blurred shots as this one.
There weren’t a lot of spectators along the way, albeit as always the aid stations were run by a small but enthusiastic contingent of wonderful volunteers. There was at one quick out-and-back segment to get up to 26.2 miles total a coterie of children, lead by one kid rockin’ a super punny tee — slice to meet you, kid!
An ambulance was roving the course for emergency support. It passed me twice and each time I thought about hos much better it was to be an ambulance chaser than to be pursued by an ambulance and an EMT saying, “Man! You look terrible! Do you need help?” Still, I never could catch that ambulance…
So here’s the halfway point. Around this time I found it getting progressively harder and harder to get my iPhone’s camera app to open. Whether it was the humidity or a combination of the sweat and sloshed water that sometimes I’d use to try and rinse off the caked on orange Gatorade spilled on my hands, I just couldn’t seem to get the capacitive touchscreen to register my finger swipes or button punches. So as the day wore on, there’d be less and less photos as, well, there just wasn’t a way to get the app to open to TAKE photos.
Somebody at the packet pickup said the “new” New River Marathon course, done in a mad scramble this past year due to community relations and changes in venues, meant there would be three large hills — one early, one around mile 12 or 15, and one somewhere else. I thought maybe since there were hills at miles 12 AND 15 that I’d passed all three… how wrong I would turn out to be.
After summiting the mile 15 “Everest” we would eventually find ourselves doubling back along the river toward the starting line.
Somewhere around mile 20-ish I just couldn’t get the phone to work at all, so these are the last of the photos along the course.
Somewhere close to 23 we passed the road that would’ve taken us back up a hill toward the start/finish area. Instead we looped around into a private property trail section that had a cool canopy of trees. It was a pleasant segment… right up to what turned out to be the FOURTH hill of the course. I must have counted an imaginary hill as one of the reported three inclines… that or I was in an Orwellian Room 101 experiment where “four” is “three.”
Mile 25.2-ish was a steep, steep, STEEP switchback climb. And every time I’d round a switchback thinking I had hit the top, there would just be more inclines to climb. I walked it. I just couldn’t run it and thus my final mile was a slow, slow, slow pace. Here’s the screengrab from my Garmin which illustrates the point:
In the end, I made it back to the finish. While those three (seriously, it was FOUR hills!) were tough (and that last one was cruel by ANY standard), I think the revised course must have been smoothed out in a lot of ways given past reviews on marathonguide.com. There were some stellar straightaway sections and I was able to maintain a pretty decent pace throughout. But that last hill — man, it was brutal.
The best part of driving 1200 miles roundtrip to go run this North Carolina race was that it afforded me a chance to make a quick detour to see one of my dearest friends from back in the day. As I said at the beginning… it’s a small world after all. And there’s nothing quite like catching up with some classic friends to remind you of that.
Great seeing you, Rob. You and the Charlotte “Skoons” are awesome. And your shirt, a reimagined Carolina Panthers logo as Chewbacca dethroned that kid’s “slice to meet you” shirt as my favorite of the weekend. I did forget to ask you if on the back it says, “I suggest a new strategy, NFL… let the Panthers win.”
