I’ve been here before… but not on foot.
A lot of the Seville Marathon course followed the “Hop On, Hop Off” Bus Route of yore… with “yore” being specifically yesterday. It would’ve been fresh in my head anyway… but because I had actively sought to be IN-active yesterday, I actually rode the HoHo twice… once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It was a 24-hour pass and had I finished the race faster I might have been able to squeeze in a third ride… albeit I suspect it would’ve been a truncated tour given that the roads were jammed with marathon paraphernalia.
Two German fellows, Arten and Oliver, arrived at the AirBNB yesterday to run this morning so we all walked down together. I said I knew where we were going as I had walked it on Friday… but I was still relieved when we came across other runners going in the same direction. I didn’t want to be responsible for leading the Germans astray.
It’s always a little surreal running in a foreign country when you don’t speak the language… I was yelled at repeatedly by security guards for apparently going the wrong way, something their words didn’t click for me but their tone and flailing hand gestures made abundantly clear. To be fair, there weren’t any signs, and I just happened to wander down to the start line… unaware that the countless other runners doing it were doing so without regard to the rent-a-cop’s warnings. And when I tried to then exit back the way I had come, I was again yelled at … I guess he wanted me to go straight down the now-barricaded course even though there was literally no reason for doing that. But I can’t say I blame foreigners not exactly loving the Americans at the moment. Hell, I was kinda glad my nationality got messed up in registration and my bib had a Spanish flag on it rather than the stars and stripes. I love my country… I just don’t love what’s happening at the top governmental levels at the moment.
Anyhoo, I made it to the start by following the crowds… not the crowds going the way I had been going but the crowds going parallel to the way I had been going but on the other side of the median… which I could only access by effectively going all the way back to the beginning, a human-sized version of “Sorry!” Again, whatever, man. I’m not bitter. Maybe just a pale ale as opposed to an IPA. Is that right, beer aficionados? I’m not a big beer guy. Ask me the gradations of Diet Soda and I’m just huckleberry; ask me about wines and I can tell you if it’s red or white; ask me if it’s beer, I can usually just tell you, “meh… not for me.”
As for the race itself, I was feeling the phantom-shark-bite throughout most of the opening miles… but it kidna settled down as the day wore on. I felt the ball of my foot a bit more… and just a general exhaustion that comes from jetlag.
Hey, look! It’s the Torre de Oro! And the Bullring!
Like a Spike Lee commercial of old, it’s gotta be the shoes. I think my expensive walking around shoes, which have special orthopedic insoles I got from a podiatrist one time, are not helping. These $30 Chinese produced red shoes I first bought as a pair for my Greatest American Hero costume and now buy in bulk from Amazon seem to work better for running. Maybe I should get a pair for walking around in. I often subscribed to a friend’s advice that cheap things no good and good things no cheap… but these shoes seem to be the exception that proves the rule.
I thought I was running pretty fast… or at least I was running pretty fast for me… but look at all the people ahead of me. And they don’t even look winded. I wonder what kind of shoes they have. I hear the new Nike VaporMax shoes are available to mortals now… maybe everybody has a pair… or maybe everybody in Spain is just super fast! Arriba! Arriba! Andale, andale!
Astronaut Kevin… he’s taking a rocket. Goodbye marathon race. I’ll be there soooooooon… or in a couple of hours I guess.
There’s that Sevilla Tower again… just as out-of-place in the skyline as it was from the bus.
Man, there are a lot of people in front of me.
And they’re breaking away from me too!
The halfway point — I was running just over a 3 hour pace… roughly comparable to my time at the Sun Marathon last week.
It really felt like a blog greatest hits clip show on the run… here’s the Kansas City joke reborn.
Anybody who knows me knows I can’t get enough of giant foam characters. Not in a creepy way, I just think they’re awesome. And so when we got to the stadium and this dude was outside giving high-fives? Well, high five me up, uh, mascot dude. I tried googling it but the Sevilla Futbol Team mascot is Locco and looks nothing like this guy… so… is he a bandit mascot? I don’t know.
The Plaza De Espana is probably my favorite location in Sevilla, and running through its main plaza was a real treat. What normally is the purview of horse drawn carriages and segways was for a brief moment the route of runners. Delightful.
Hey, Macarena! As a lot of the course has been, this was a nice throwback to the Hop On, Hop Off bus.
Heading into the home stretch — Google translating the first arch produces the phrase “Now there is no giving up!”
And the final push…
Which showed me missing a BQ by “THAT” much.
The official results which reflect the chip time of when I crossed the starting mat and the finish line puts me at 3:09:44 — which means a BQ of 16 seconds.
Post run, some potato chips (patatas fritas) and a crappy lemon beer that I didn’t finish (un cerveza, no gracias).
A personal victory over adversity… that’s how the day went. I just wish I wasn’t so bloated in most of the photos. Too much vino? But cutting that out negates the sideline benefits of the marathons. And not cutting that out means I have to keep running marathons. A catch-22, no?