The Marine Corps Marathon - Part I

In an attempt to make this more readable, I am going to write my Marine Corps Marathon Recap in 2 Parts.  Here is Part One.

“How can there be traffic in Southern Jersey at midnight in late October?” I grumbled.  Predictably there was no answer to my question, as Stefany remained quietly sleeping in the passenger seat.  Rolling along at 5mph on the southbound Jersey Turnpike, I was taking the opportunity to go through my marathon setlist for some last minute tweaking. 

“How in the world did ‘Say Something I’m Giving Up on You’ get on here,” I rolled my eyes and wondered. Any song with "giving up" in it doesn't belong on a running mix.  Clearly I had some editing to do.

DELETE.

The closer to Washington DC we got, the more I thought about the impending doom I was purposely heading towards.  I hadn’t done a training run more than 13.5 miles and every one of my 10+ mile training runs ended in some pretty severe pain.  Yet in two days, I was going to be running the Marine Corps Marathon.

As for the sleeping girl in the passenger seat, this was going to be her first marathon and she had trained even less than me.  I was nervous that I wouldn’t make the 26.2 miles, and I have done two of these before.  Stefany had no clue what she was up against.

Knowing that we were both undertrained and wouldn’t be able to run the whole race straight through, we had engineered a strategy for finishing the race in one piece.  We would run the first mile as a warm-up, then alternate 7 minutes running and 3 minutes walking.  If we stuck to our pacing we should make it to the bridge in time at mile 20 just before it closed.  Then we could somehow figure out how to finish the last 6.2 miles from there. 

I thought the plan would work, but I was still concerned.  Specifically I was concerned about the pain I had been experiencing in my feet during long-runs.  “Your body is just not used to being on your feet for that long,” my running coach had told me.  It made sense, and so the rest of the plan was simple – get to the race early and find a spot to sit down to minimize the time I would spend on my feet.  It was our best chance for success.

The next day we hit the racing expo and got our numbers from some very polite marines with a, “thank you, ma’am,” or, “thank you, sir.”  The expo was jam-packed.  Since our fathers are both marines, Stefany and I wanted to get them some overpriced official MCM gear.  We shopped a bit – picking up some hats and shirts, but when it was time to get on line, it was just too damn long and we decided to put everything back.

We were amid the crowd when someone tapped me on the shoulder.  I turned and saw a woman who I didn’t recognize.  “Good luck in the race tomorrow,” she said.  I was a bit confused, but smiled and graciously said thanks and she went on her way.

“Who was that?” asked Stefany.

“I have no idea,” I said.  “Was I rude?”

“No, not at all,” Stefany replied.

“Good.”

It was on my mind for a few minutes when I realized I had worn my racing shirt to the expo and the person likely had recognized me from online somewhere – be it this blog, twitter or maybe my youtube video from last year.  My first brush with blogging fame and I was clueless.

We didn’t spend too much time at the expo given the crowds, but we were able to pick up a few things and then headed back to the hotel.  There we laid out all of our racing gear and went to the pre-race dinner for the American Cancer Society's DetermiNation team.  This was the second such dinner I have had the honor of attending and, as such, I got to see exactly how many of the same jokes the director, Ramon Bermo, re-uses every time he speaks.  But other than that, the dinner was incredibly moving and we all left with a sense of empowerment - not only in that we were about to participate in an athletic event that most people will not even attempt in their lifetime, but that we all do it in the name of fighting a devastating disease that effects everyone in one way or another.  As Ramon puts it, "We really make our miles meaningful."

We went back to the hotel room, set the alarm clock and turned in to bed.  I looked down on my wrist at the bracelet there.  I don't normally wear these things, but this one was special - it had been given to me just before running my first marathon in NYC.  It honors my neighbor Brielle, who was a young girl I had the pleasure of knowing before she lost her battle with cancer.  Her mother gave it to me and I haven't taken it off since; it has been there almost a whole year.  Just seeing it there gave me a sense of comfort in knowing that there was a greater purpose to my marathon-running and that I owed it to myself to finish tomorrow - no matter how much pain I would need to overcome.

We slept like babies. 

We woke up and  went through our morning pre-run routines.  For me that means eating a banana, a Zone bar and drinking a Gatorade.  Then I lube up and get dressed, double/triple/quadruple-checking to make sure I have every item I need: my bib, my card for the Metro, my license, some money, my nutrition stuff, warm throw-away clothes and the hotel key.  We met the rest of the American Cancer Society’s DetermiNation team in the hotel lobby and headed for the starting line at 6am for a race that started at 7:55.

The commute was as quick as can be given the wacky set-up of the DC Metro.  I’ve lived in New York and Boston, and neither the New York Subway nor Boston’s T would have earned great praise from my prior experiences there.  At least not until I got to witness the absurdity that is the DC Metro.  They don’t charge one fee to gain access to the train – instead they charge you by how far you actually travel.  It sounds like a fair concept – why should you pay the same amount to go a few blocks as you do to go a few miles?  Well… where do I begin?

In order to track the distance you travel, you have to get a personalized card.  That’s right, there’s no sharing of a DC Metro card.  You could have a million dollars stored on it, but only one person is getting through the gate with that card, which means everyone in your traveling party has to have their own.  And then when you get to the place you’re going, you have to swipe the card again so that they know how much to charge you.  So, what happens if you don’t have enough money on the card?  That’s a great question – well, you’ll be stuck living the rest of your life in the underground tunnels with the rats.  Either that, or you better have a credit card on you, or else you'll never be allowed to leave.

Of further note is the logjam this creates at the gates.  Some people are going into the subway and have to swipe; some people are going out of the subway and have to swipe.  Invariably it’s a showdown with people lined up and trying to push their way through to the exits.  Leave it to Washington DC to create the dumbest public transportation system in the country.

The system is especially ineffective when you have 30,000 people amassing to one location at a specific time, most of whom are out-of-towners with no familiarity to how things work.  Fun times.

Still, we got to the marathon location in pretty good time.  All we had to do now was find the starting area and I could sit down, rest my legs and prepare for the day’s real torture.  At least, that was supposed to be the plan.  And since we were there 90 minutes before the start of the race, there was no reason to think it should be otherwise.

But it was otherwise.

At first we couldn’t figure out what the hold-up was.  It was just a mass of people waiting, hardly moving at all.  We just joined the mob.  Our coach, Ramon, said, “Something must have happened at security.  It’s never like this – usually you walk right in.”  Ramon had run this race before, so there was no reason not to believe him.  Only nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  The line inched forward ever so slowly as we all stood in the drizzling morning rain.

A few minutes became ten, became thirty, became an hour… and suddenly we were wondering if we were going to make it in time for the start.  I had expected to meet an old college friend near the information tent, but I would never make it there in time.  So what was the problem?

Metal detectors – precisely 8 of them for any runner emerging from the Metro station.  As we got to the front, we could see them lined up.  Hundreds of runners were still in front of us and there were literally thousands still jammed up behind us – as far as the eye could see.  Parachuters exited airplanes overhead, unfurling huge American flags.  Osprey helicopters thundered past low in the sky, reminding me somewhat of the Red Dawn helicopter ambush scene.  I can’t imagine being a Taliban goat herder in the middle of the desert seeing one of these things coming your way. 

We were still on line, knowing that the race was now about to start imminently when someone yelled, “If you do not have a bag, you can go to the left.”  Really?  I don’t know if this was a last minute attempt to expedite the process, or if it was that way all along.  Wouldn't a visible sign or two have been nice?  And if it wasn’t that way all along, maybe this process could have been implemented when it became clear that thousands of runners were going to be late for the start, which had been pretty evident to all of us some time ago.  We made our way to the left through the crowd where they checked our bibs and let us right in.

Later on I heard from some people that some runners brought their families with them to the runner’s village.  And some people brought their own backpacks full of stuff that needed extra time to be searched.  Also the rain caused the metal detectors to malfunction at times and it just turned into mayhem.  I don’t know if these are true because they checked for my bib before letting me in, and obviously spectators wouldn’t have bibs.  And they gave you clear bags at the expo to put stuff in, and my experience in NYC was that all your stuff had to go in the clear bag or it wasn’t coming in at all.

What I do know is that the whole charade was very poorly organized.  I understand the need for security – this is a very big event that involves many of our servicemen and women and obviously marathons have been a target in the past.  But maybe give us a hint that security measures were strengthened and that we should arrive 3 or 4 hours before the start.  I find it hard to believe that the Marine Corps Marathon didn’t expect this problem – these are people who organize midnight raids in Kabul, for crying out loud.  It shouldn’t have been this difficult.

We finally got through the gate and predictably there was very little crowd left – most had made their way to the starting line.  There was a row of porta-potties there, each with a line about 10-deep.  But about 200 yards across the parking lot was another long row of them with no line.  We quickly decided to make a bee-line for those ones, sprinting across the parking lot to hopefully make the start.  After emptying our bladders we stripped off our throw-away sweats and hustled to the starting line, which was miraculously still flooded with runners.  We hopped in line, way behind where we wanted to start, and marched towards the starting line… and before we knew it, we were running.  I checked my watch… we were 20 minutes behind the clock start… which meant it was twenty less minutes we had to beat the bridge.

And right from the get-go, our plan was shot.  On top of that, we had been standing on our feet for 2 straight hours and had just sprinted 200 yards to the bathroom – which is not likely a proper warm-up before a marathon.  And did I mention that it was raining?  None of that mattered anymore though.  Now we were running.