I have already touched a bit upon how the crowds disappointed me a bit at the marathon, but other than that I have little but good things to say about the race. It is the first time that I got to run a marathon with a friend from college (John Tomac), and it certainly made everything much easier than running one alone can be. Here is the general run down of how everything went. I will start with what happened before the race even began.
I stayed with John during my stay in New York. We did a 6 miler on Friday when I arrived, and ran a bit over 3 on Saturday morning. Friday afternoon we went to the expo to pick up all of our gear and get that out of the way. The expo was pretty big, but it did not seem to have much that I was actually interested in. We got our meal tickets for Saturday night with our race bags, and after wandering around New York City for hours on end on Saturday we got in line for the meal. The meal was excellent. Surprisingly, it was not just a bland mass of pasta and sauce like I was expecting. They had three different flavors of pasta, and one of them was quite spicy. They also served dinner rolls and salad, along with water, gatorade, and Coors. Once inside the Tavern on the Green, everything moved along nicely and nobody seemed to be too much in the way.
The night of the race, John’s roommates were going out for a night on the town. It worked out rather well, since they woke us up in their drunken stupor right around 4:15 in the morning, which was when we wanted to get up in the first place. After a small breakfast and a cab ride to the Meadowlands, we got on the bus bound for Staten Island. Unfortunately, our bus driver was none too swift. Every time there was a sign telling you which way to get to the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, she had to pull over and radio for directions. She only had to turn around twice, which is quite fun in a bus. We were on one of the earlier buses, so we still got to the island with plenty of time to spare.
I dropped my bag off fairly early in the green start zone, despite moving back a bit to start in the blue area. There was more sun and more easily accessible food and port-o-john’s in the green zone, so we wound up spending most of our time there. There was plenty of food and water to eat before hand, which we took good advantage of up until about 45 minutes before the start.
Unfortunately, we were in line for a port-o-john when the crowd was allowed forward to the starting line. We had to rush over and fight our way over, and wound up starting probably 10 or 15 seconds farther back than we otherwise had the right to. All in all, we did not make out too badly for our blunder. John was not able to show off his tearaway paper pants for very long, since he wound up ditching them about 10 minutes after putting them on.
Tomorrow morning, I will get into the actual splits and observations from the course.
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