George and Kate Rose are old hands at multiday events. George was a participant of Mainly Marathons first Dust Bowl series and later wrote a book chronicling the madness. He and Kate were eventually corralled into administrative roles with them for the next 6 years or so. And today was their first race run under their own Road To 50 Banner.
It was all impeccably organized which was hardly surprising.
And just as unsurprising was the loop course tradition of the loops being a little long… thus causing the repeated loops to add on over a mile to the marathon distance. It might have been me – maybe I should have run the tangents better. But I suspect it was just long.
Round and round I went for 20 loops. George and Kate innovated off the typical rubber band counting system with an official wrist band chip system. You had to tap at each end of the loop; seemed to work just fine.
I found myself running pretty consistently for the first ten loops… and then pretty consistently worse thereafter.
Maybe it was the realization that the course was long. Or the rising sun beating down.
The thunderstorms didn’t arrive until the afternoon and I was thankfully done by then… though the flash floods and hail took a toll on my roadtrip to Point Pleasant, WV.
This small town is perhaps most famous for originating the Mothman sightings. In the mid 1960s, some locals spotted a winged creature with glowing red eyes. It chased them at speeds in excess of 100 mph. Was it a mutant bird due to toxic waste dumping left over from WWII munitions work in nearby Nitro? Was it an alien? A harbinger of disaster? The latter explanation crept up as 13 months after the sighting the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46. The mothman was never seen again in Point Pleasant but was supposedly spotted in Mexico City before a devastating earthquake in 1985… and again in Chernobyl just before its nuclear catastrophe.
Years later, “the Mothman Prophesies” by John A. Keel would help popularize the story… and in 2001 it was adapted into a major motion picture starring Richard Gere… with some notable liberties taken including resetting the bridge collapse of the 1960s in the current era.
Since 2003 there’s been a mothman statue in downtown Point Pleasant.
And since 2006, there’s been the one and only Mothman Museum. So that’s where I went today, 41 miles from my airbnb.
