(This post was mostly written a week ago, but lay unfinished until now due to work and dead-car related business)

I’ve never before structured a long weekend around a long-distance run, but there’s a first time for everything.

On the evening of August 30 I drove down to Orange County to pick up my bib and chip for the race. During the journey, my car decided to throw a fit and blink its “check engine” light at me. This led me to ponder the fact that it’s now the 21st century and our vehicles, which are endowed with enough intelligence to actually know the nature of any problems they encounter, are still unable to communicate anything more to the driver than the non-specific illumination of a single LED or light bulb. Pathetic. It would probably add fifty cents to the cost of the car to put a little LCD screen that shows human-readable error messages in the space currently taken up by the check engine light. I suspect that in my case this screen would have read “cylinder 1 not firing”, as when I exited the freeway I noticed that the car shook a bit and the engine was running less smoothly than normal. Luckily I was already near my destination, and when I met up with Ken and Essie we all jumped into their less problematic vehicle.

Final registration for the half-marathon took place in the Disneyland Hotel convention center. I was given my bib (which I pinned to my singlet for the run) and championchip¹ (which I zip-tied to my shoe). There were a ton of companies with booths at the convention center, selling or promoting their wares. I saw a number of running shirts with amusing and/or stupid slogans written on them, such as the worrisome “toenails are for sissies“. I taste-tested a bunch of different Clif bars, tried a Mocha-flavored Clif Shot Gel (that gooey packet was the nastiest thing I’ve ever “drunk”) and a Clif Shot Blok (mmm, carnuba wax). I ended up with a nice collection of schwag, including energy bars, gels, and caffeine-laced energy jelly beans².

The race was set to start the next morning at 6:00 AM, so I set my iPod’s alarm for 4:30, and set the alarm to play a really obnoxious remix. Ken and I watched the Firefly miniseries/Pilot and then it was lights out.

I woke up instantly at 4:30 AM and shut off the alarm before it could finish playing one bar. My left eye seemed irritated and possibly infected, but I had not brought glasses along and was not going to run blind, so I inserted my contact lenses. We had breakfast and coffee, and then headed to Anaheim.

The nearest freeway exit to the race was closed, and so were many of the streets leading to the start line, so it took a while to get anywhere near the race. Ken and I ended up exiting the car about a mile-and-a-half from the start point and ran to the race. It’s too bad he hadn’t yet instructed his gps watch to start logging data, as it would be interesting to know how much further than 13.1 miles we both ran that day. We both entered our respective “corrals”. Since I’m an untested runner with no time on record, I started in the last wave of the last corral. This meant I queued up with thousands of other slow folk in a wide, block-long swath of thousands, and my race began about 20 minutes after the first corral had started running. I set my Nike+ iPod to have me run a half-marathon distance and queued up the run playlist I’d put together.

Eventually our corral was released, and we all jogged slowly, with hiccoughs, toward and through the starting line. I’d planned to take it easy and go slow the first few miles, but quickly found that I needed to put no effort toward that goal, as the crowd was so tightly packed I could barely run. According to my iPod, I started out running an 8 minute mile, but then dropped to about 11 minutes per mile for the next few as I weaved my way through the crowd. As Ken had forewarned, there were plenty of people walking or stopping to take photos within the first few hundred yards of the race. They all had as much a right to be there as I, but it would have improved the race experience for everyone if slower folk were encouraged to move to the right and faster to the left. It didn’t help that the route through Disneyland and California Adventure often went through fairly thin bottlenecks, at which points we all had to walk or even stop if the people ahead were taking photos.

By the fifth mile I’d found a little more space, and celebrated by accelerating. It was fun to realize that benefit of all that training. When mile 6 came around I felt great, and wasn’t remotely fatigued. It was fun running along with thousands of other people, and though I’m not the most competitive person in the world, it was fun and great motivation to continually pass people –hundreds of people. I suppose that’s a benefit of starting in the last corral: With the exception of the times I stopped to drink at refreshment stations, I don’t think I was ever passed. I guess everyone was taking it easy. I’d expected to run most of the half-marathon at a steady pace of about 8:30/mi, and eventually I settled on a speed a little faster than that according to my pedometer.

Along the route were often stationed local police, boy scouts, cheer squads, and marching bands. These people showed as much endurance as any runner, as they cheered and high-fived relentlessly from the sidelines for over 3 hours.

After the first few miles, there were drink stations each mile or two at which volunteers would hand out cups of water and powerade. I walked through every-other station to drink a half-glass of powerade. Somewhere towards the last few miles there was a station handing out Clif shots. I grabbed a mocha-flavored Clif shot, it was the tastiest thing I’d ever drunk.

I’ve been using my Nike+iPod pedometer to keep track of pace and distance during training, and its soothing female voice gave me periodic updates during the half-marathon as my preloaded playlist of mp3 files spooled out. I remember noticing as I passed the sign for mile 5 or 6 that my iPod had already told me I’d passed that distance. At one point, it told me I had 1 mile remaining, and it was a little dispiriting to pass the mile marker for mile 10 or 11 soon afterward and realize there were still more than 2 miles to go³ –and just then the last song in my playlist began to play. When constructing my playlist for the run, I’d placed Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the Rain” as the last song, after the 2-hour mark. I figured it would motivate me to finish the race before it played. Oops.

I sped up for the final mile just for fun, and crossed the finish line with a time of 2:09:08. Slower than my goal, but better than half the pace of the race’s winner (John Lucas finished in 1:08:05!). Since this was the first time in my life I’ve ever run over 11 miles, let alone 13.1, I was happy to finish. And since I finished without dying, I figure I should keep the momentum and have registered for the upcoming Long Beach half-marathon.

Medals waiting to be placed on the necks of the finishers. 13,000-some people ran in the race and 10,847 finished, that’s a lot of medals.

Special thanks to my brother-in-law Ken Fine (who bested my half-marathon time by over 20 minutes) for the photos.

Addendum: My 1997 Nissan Sentra, who served me well for the better part of 175,000 miles, did indeed die. It was a good car, and it came through for that one last trip to make my half-marathon experience possible. I’m sad to see it go. That said, I will not be unexcited about its replacement.

1. WTF is a championchip? Yet another benign use of RFID technology. [↩]
2. I’m not making these up, they’re Sport Beans EXTREME, made by Ronald Reagan’s favorite confectioner, Jelly Belly. [↩]
3. I think the iPod+Nike may have been fooled into inaccuracy by all the running in place that occurred in the early part of the race [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 3:11 am and is filed under Entitled Ranting, Geeky, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.