The FINAL “I Dream of Jeannie” Cocoa Beach Half-Marathon… Now A 10K

Seven years ago, I was signed up to run the inaugural Cocoa Beach Half Marathon.  It had an I Dream of Jeannie theme and Barbara Eden was going to be there.  I was really looking forward to it… but me being me, I had double booked events that weekend.  I ran the Petrified Forest Marathon in Sedona, Arizona, on Saturday morning and had a flight back to Orlando that afternoon – everything worked on paper.  And then flights got delayed and canceled out of the teeny-tiny Sedona airport and there was no way for me to get back in time.  I tried begging, borrowing, and stealing, going so far as to investigate re-renting a car and driving it to Phoenix to try and catch a flight… but it was too late to make that happen either.  I was able to get a flight to Los Angeles and then a red-eye back to Orlando… but delays out of LAX had me touching down at 6:59 AM… and the race in Cocoa Beach some 40 miles away was starting at 7 AM.

Last year amidst the pandemic, the Cocoa Beach Half Marathon changed to a 10K to avoid having people crowded onto buses to get to the start line 13.1 miles away.  In doing so, they announced a virtual option, including an attempt to clean out old medal stock.  You could run a virtual event for all prior years and collect all the various Jeannie bottles from the series, including Jeannie’s evil twin sister’s bottle.

This year, for the final “I Dream of Jeannie” themed weekend, they announced a Major Nelson Saturn V Rocket Medal for all-series participants, including those of us who ran the virtual events.

And so it was after seven long years, I finally ran at least part of the Cocoa Beach Half Marathon course.

And while running on the packed sand at low tide as the sun climbed over the water was fun, I’m not sure this whole thing was worth my time and effort.

It’s an hour and seven minutes from my house to the event’s parking lot… one that turned out to be the WRONG parking lot.  Despite doing this for seven years, they had the wrong information on their website and in the participant packet, directing race-day pickup to a hotel half a mile from where they had set up.  Given my roundabout failure in 2014, this snafu seemed oddly fitting.

Nonetheless, I persisted, to co-op a meme.

I’m looking a little street-rat Aladdin-y with my fez and an oh-so-annoying stubble.  The former was part of a murder mystery party I threw, the latter is part of an attempt to see how grey I’ve gone.  The hairs on my chinny-chinny-chin are all white and I thought I should see if I’m salt-and-peppery or more a polar bear in a snowstorm.  But man does it itch.  I really hate it.  Plus, it makes me look bloated and fat… albeit that could be the Halloween candy I’ve stolen from any potential trick or treaters tonight.  It’s Halloween, don’t you know?

Speaking of Halloween and its fancy dress, each year the race has a “Jeannie” division where folks run in their best costumed attire… albeit I was disappointed that folks displayed their belly buttons given that Barbara Eden wasn’t allowed to show hers.

Anyhoo, I mentioned the drive time, right?  Well, because of race day pickup and the organizer’s insistence that there was a hard close at 6:15 AM (though other places in the same packet said 6:30 or 6:45), I opted to arrive early… and good thing too as I was lost in finding the locale thanks to the aforementioned inaccurate map.  But this effort also meant I was stuck hanging around a lot longer for the race to start – they had pushed the start time back to 7:30 to allow for sunrise and low-tide.  All in, I spent about 3 hours from my house to the start… and then ran 45 minutes before driving home for another hour.

This time imbalance is precisely why I generally prefer running a marathon as opposed to shorter distances.  If I’m going to get up this early, if I’m going to have to stand around for that amount of time, I’d rather run a longer distance.  The sunk costs are the same; the run pay-out is what changes between a 10K and a half-marathon… or a 5K and a marathon… or any combination of short versus long.

And yet, I’m tired.  I’m slower than I used to be too.  I’m a little nervous about the next batch of marathons in the coming weeks.  They’ll be here in the blink of an eye… or a blink and head-bob of a Jeannie as the case may be.