Dispatches from the middle

And that’s that! After a stint of solo-study-with-shortbread, I can Gangnam like a respectable person! Boom.

**I tried to insert pictures into this post, but they were pictures I’d taken with my wee flip-phone, and they were crap. Thus, no pictures and my apologies.

In other news, J and I traveled down to California recently to tackle the California International Marathon. We were woefully under-prepared, having completed a couple of ~23km training runs, followed by a whole lot of sweet-fuck-all, a month or two before the race. Yet we soldiered on, in the face of severe weather warnings, with plenty of enthusiasm and the secret pleasure of savoring an opportunity to be young and stupid.

I ran the CIM once before – back in 2007. It’s a great course – gently rolling, with a net downhill, and an impressive finish in front of the California Capitol Building, complete with Christmas tree on the first weekend of December. However, the weather is notoriously fickle. People seem to either love the race, or hate it, depending on their experience with the weather. The first year I ran it, the weather was perfect, and I naively assumed this to be the norm. I’ve now heard reports of freezing temperatures and driving rain. This year, we’d been duly warned about the impending storm, street flooding, and high winds. And yet, we soldiered on.

Billboard spotted on the way in from the airport:

Come to Reno! Loosest slots in the USA!

[If that’s not marketing saavy, I don’t know what is. In fact, I don’t know why I’m not in Reno right now.]

And thus it began. Having done everything else wrong in preparing for this extravaganza, we threw all caution to the wind and enjoyed a pre-race-day of loafing and extraordinarily spicy beef in Sacramento.

Bearing all our follies in mind, getting up at 05:30 on the morning of to the sound of pounding rain and the prospect of hardly-unlikely failure wasn’t easy. It’s moments like these when the knowledge that you paid $100, and flew yourself to California, simply for the privilege of hurting yourself under the auspices of the California International Marathon, is a saving grace. Probably wouldn’t have moved otherwise! We sighed, got up, donned what we guessed to be adequate armour, and ventured out.

Our friend R was kind enough to drive us to the start (also kind enough, together with his amazing mother, to put us up for the weekend!). Just before sunrise, we rolled past Folsom Prison – what up, JC ?! – and arrived at the drop-off point. The rain beat down as we jogged towards the start, tossing our drop bags into the trucks as we passed, trusting they’d be delivered, as promised, to the finish line.

Gusting wind and rain continued for the first three and a half hours or so.

There was no way this would be a fast run, so my focus shifted to the little things. I discovered I could take pictures of myself and text while running (yup, going that slow!). While this is not normally advisable race behaviour, it’s just the ticket for an aquamarathon. Shortly after the halfway point, and the abovementioned photos, I stopped to pet a deliciously adorable (possibly delicious and adorable…) puppy. Puppy power carried me for a few kilometers after that. I know it doesn’t sound very hardcore, but that shit’s nothin’ to sniff at!

Despite the weather, there were a lot of enthusiastic spectators out to cheer on the runners, and to entertain us with their signs and antics:

Spectator sign not seen my me, but joyfully whispered about by other runners:

Marathons aren’t easy! But your mother sure is…

Spotted as the woman holding it had her picture taken with a male runner:

You’ve got stamina! Call me! 

On what looked like a table top adorned with blinking lights:

Holding this sign isn’t easy either! (and I don’t suspect it was…it was huge!)

The rain did eventually give way to a gorgeous sunny day – the very best of California:

At about 35km, still sopping wet and adhering to a strict “run ’til it hurts too badly, then walk ’til you forget how badly it hurts when you run” regimen that had me cruising along at about 6:30/km, I came upon a veritable saint on the side of the road. A man was standing on the meridian with a pitcher of beer and a stack of those wee paper cups you get at the dentist’s office. Those of you who also like to drink while running, and run while drinking, will appreciate how happy this made me! I thanked him profusely and we parted ways with a joyful “On On!”.

Beer and the knowledge that I was helping the man in the extremely bright tights finish under his goal time – it’s so much easier when you’ve got someone to chat to – carried me the rest of the way. With the possible exception of finishing under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, I think the CIM is my favourite race finish. And it was that much better this time around, given that I hadn’t really expected to finish in the first place!

Looking back, I feel on the one hand, like I disrespected the marathon and really dodged a bullet coming out of it uninjured. On the other (smaller and stupider) hand, holy crap – maybe you don’t need to practice for these after all!