After the race, it was cold. Anybody that knows me knows that I do not say that lightly. No matter which block you were on, it was windy. The finish line is similar to New York City, where they do their very best to funnel you away from the finish line as fast as possible. There are plenty of race volunteers and medics in the finish chute, and you have to walk about a quarter mile to get to the water bottles.
None of the volunteers knew who had won, or whether the Red Sox had played or not. They really needed a radio. One of the big disappoints this year was that there was no game updates as I ran. In 2005, the game was being blasted on the radio, people had their own scoreboards up that they updated for the runners, and it seemed that any spectator or volunteer that you asked could tell you who was winning the race and what the Red Sox were winning by.
Once I got to the water area, I did learn that Robert Cheruiyot had won the race. Nobody was sure who had won the women’s race, though. I also saw a few familiar faces as some Mainers were manning the water station. I stopped to chat for a little while and then moved on.
I think that Boston handled the food much better than New York. Rather than a prepackaged bag, they gave you an empty bag. You then got to wander around like a kid on halloween. I almost regretted having just bought a case of Powerbar Harvest bars, as before I knew it my bag was overflowing with them. The banana tasted really good.
One thing that they did not handle well was the baggage. They used school buses to get the baggage to the finish line. Unfortunately, they left the baggage on the buses and handed them out the windows. Since people who were seeded near one another had a tendency to finish near one another, the baggage buses got a pretty good crowd in front of them pretty fast. The woman on my bus kept trying to find individual bags, despite our efforts to have her hold the bags up and yell out numbers to see if the person was there. I heard her yell my number, but rather than passing the bag out the window she put it back down. I was able to see it in the window of the bus for 7 or 8 minutes while I near on froze myself until I was able to convince the three people around me to yell at her to pass it down. They were just excited that somebody was getting their bag, even if it wasn’t them.
I had some trouble finding a place that was protected from the wind in order to change. I wound up asking a bellhop if I could duck inside a nearby hotel long enough to get dry clothes on, and he directed me to the rest room where there were already a few runners. It was so warm in there…
Once I had cleaned up (baby wipes are a shower in bag) and put on some dry clothes, I made my way out and found my friends. About 2 minutes later, my friend that I ran with wandered by. I directed him into the hotel where I had changed and the rest of us got some drinks while we waited for him.
We tried finding an open T stop, but everything was closed. I didn’t really mind all of the walking, though. I would have wanted to do it anyway. We found an Irish restaurant and I ordered some grilled salmon. It was quite tasty, although the IPA I ordered was a bit lacking.
It turns out that another of our college teammates was randomly in Boston, and my friend saw him as he ran by. By another coincidence, a third teammate (who lived in the city) met up with us at a restaurant afterwards and on the way walked by a bar where the random former teammate was getting a drink. What are the chances? We managed to get a good sized crowd together before all was said and done.
The largest problem after the race was getting home. The weather had hit Maine a lot harder than it had hit Massachussetts (so far, about $27 million in damage has been reported) so my commute home was a bit more difficult than it had to be. The pool that I had planned on swimming in at least three times this week didn’t open until yesterday, so I only got one swim in. I did a jig jog this evening, though, and my legs feel pretty good considering that I just ran a marathon. I am jig jogging a 5k in the morning to help support my wife’s law school, and have to decide if I am ready to get back on the Grand Prix circuit the weekend after with a 10k.
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