It’s Groundhog Day!
In more ways than one.
For the third time in three years and the fifth time since I started running marathons, I drove down to Huntington Beach to run the Surf City Marathon. With a three-year streak, I was technically a legacy runner… though I had to argue the point after the race to get my free t-shirt… like I needed another t-shirt. But it was the principle of the thing!
The course I was told was slightly altered this year… but I didn’t notice. Seemed like the same as always — a 9 or 10 mile loop through a neighborhood and a park then out onto the PCH for a couple miles, turn around and head toward the finish… and at mile 16.5, make a u-turn onto the beach bike path for 5 miles, make a U-turn and come back to the finish. It’s that back and forth turning that can get demoralizing… all the moreso when I’m in a snit because they said I wasn’t a legacy.
I got there super early as I pre-paid for a race day bib pickup (an extra $25 to save a two hour plus roundtrip earlier this weekend… was it worth it?). They didn’t open when they said they would and the line stretched pretty far behind me. As it was, the race was to start at 6:30 and they didn’t start giving out race day bibs until 5:45 or so. When they did, they scanned my code to issue me a bib but didn’t note I was a legacy runner… despite my code clearly saying I was. So when I went to the legacy table, they looked at my bib and said I didn’t qualify. When I asked at one other counter about pre-registering for 2021, the woman looked at my bib and said since I didn’t have a sticker I wasn’t there yet… I’d just have to keep running to one day make it. I’m sure it was a marketing phrasing but I took it as a bit of an insult. I run enough, lady… and I am a legacy runner. But there wasn’t time to argue and so I headed to the start line in the aforementioned snit.
There was a pre-race 24.8 second moment of silence for ALL nine victims of the helicopter crash last week here in LA… though they arrived at that number by taking the two jersey numbers for Kobe Bryant. I’m in minority here but while the guy did some good things, he also did some not so good things and in praising the guy non-stop this past week it felt like folks deified rather than humanized the guy… to the exclusion of the seven other people who died (folks did at least acknowledge the tragedy of Bryant’s 13 year old daughter also dying in the crash). It was a downer way to start the race… especially after the somber mood was broken by the race announcer’s cry, “Thank you for that… now who’s excited to run the Surf City Marathon?!” It was… whiplash inducing.
As I keep saying — snit, snit, snit. It was a brisk morning, and overcast, and pretty great running conditions. But I just wasn’t in the mood. It was a run, more a chance to just be out and about and putting in mileage than it was a race for me. And because I’ve run it a few times, the course was a bit boring — I ran the route by rote if that makes sense.
And that freakin’ turnaround at 16.5 that I always try and tell myself is coming once again took the enthusiasm out of me. The 5 miles to the turnback feels interminable. I remember way back in 2009 when I first ran this thinking throughout that stretch, “how much freakin’ farther to the turnaround? Where the freak is the turnaround? Are you freakin’ kidding me? I’m not at the turnaround yet?!”
Only I didn’t say freakin’. I would imagine 2009 was the era of Battlestar Galactica so I probably said “frakin’.”
In any case, I didn’t take many photos — it is the same as it ever was. I didn’t see my shadow much so I guess that means six more weeks of marathoning. Or something.
To sum up — here’s a finish line photo, perhaps one of the last race photos I’ll take with my broken Galaxy S10. I’ve ordered a replacement off eBay to tide me over until the new S20 comes out… and perhaps a good thing as I think my perspiration fell through the cracked screen and shorted out more pixels. So it’s a little blurry.
It’s always something. Still, I’m always glad to have run… even I don’t always love running.