More than 30,000 runners registered for the Marine Corps Marathon last Sunday, 21,226 started the race and 20,642 finished.
My friend Lynn Campbell and I were among them.
Lynn and I run together 6:30 a.m. every Friday morning before we head to our respective workplaces. Signing up for this race last spring gave us a reason to split Sonny’s breakfast special each week.
Her plan for the race had been to prevent injury by running with me at my slower pace. Once into the race, she realized the difficulty of that well-meaning promise and loped ahead to finish nearly 45 minutes ahead of me. It was the right thing to do.
The Marine Corps course on the DC and Virginia sides of the Potomac River was revised from previous years. Long parts of the run were on concrete highways and on-ramps, and the monuments were fairly distant.
It was described as “circular”, but was actually quadrants in and out, forward and back, until it finally ended at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, where race photographers took photos of finishers, the Marines gave out pretzels and pineapple juice, and a long line of runners snaked up to buy “finishers’ gear from Brooks.
The “M” could stand for “Merchandise” not Marine; the logowear was for purchase and purchased everywhere. There may not have been the pre-advertised shuttle buses to the start line, but there sure were to the race expo to facilitate shopping.
We gave our Powerade and other expo food and drink samples to the homeless man who lives under a plastic tarp near our hotel.
The race atmosphere was pretty serious rather than a party atmosphere. There were few costumes, lots of 5+ hour marathoners, and many wore shirts in memory of the dead and ill. A number of participants carried huge American flags the whole distance.
Many runners stopped to pose and take cellphone photos and chatted over and over about where they were and where to find them. Many ignored the headphone ban.
In spots the ground was extremely slippery with the residue of jelly beans, orange peels, gel wrappers, sticky cups and water.
The day before the race, to save our feet, we took a Washington trolley tour. “Clang, clang went the bell” etc when someone boarded. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream!” speech blared forth when we passed Freedom Plaza.
Before 9/11 you could tour the White House. Now to get tickets to the White House you need to go through your Congressman and it can take over six months.
Lots of self-centred trivia about the tallest president, the shortest president, the oldest president, the youngest president etc.
D.C. itself is beautiful. Washington has more trees than any other city in the U.S. Also very apparently more monuments and statues. Definitely the most Starbucks.
We visited the bedroom where Lincoln died, and had lunch in Georgetown.
The weekend was a funny mix of security and non-security. We were scanned with wands before going into the race expo, and our bags were examined by a Marine at the race start, but in the hotel we could walk into the health club without even using a room card and there was no security from elevator to room. Yet the race hotel locator map cautioned: “Be aware of your surroundings at all times and keep alert. The hotel accepts no responsibility for any guest who chooses to jog.”
On Friday we awoke at 3:30 a.m., met at the Ottawa airport at 4:30 and by 8 a.m. we were on the shuttle van from Dulles Airport for the hour-long ride to Capitol Hill.
By 10 a.m. we were at the Expo, in the nearby all-day outdoor pasta tent, ready for ‘lunch.’ We ate in the near-empty outdoor tent with a dozen big-shouldered slim-waisted soooo polite – “Yes, M’aam” - Marines who put their caps on the table and were eager to tuck into the pasta too.
Thousands of uniformed Marines were everywhere at the weekend, handing out water and gels on course, giving out finishers’ medals, and manning the extremely efficient UPS bag check-in and pick-up.
Dozens of brown UPS trucks took the more than 20,000 clear bags from the start to the finish, and lined up by the first two numbers of bib numbers so they were easy to find.
Things you get at the Marine Corps Marathon that you don’t get at the Ottawa Marathon:
- Miss Utah, a member of the National Guard and a marathoner, as guest speaker at the pasta dinner. To sum up her advice for marathoning: “Make every shot count.” “Load and lock” and “Aim for target and hit the target.”
- The trooping of the colors and the pledge of allegiance to open the dinner
- A pre-race prayer service. (Maybe it worked. The weather was a bit breezy, but perfect.) There was also a lot of praying during the race, thanking Jesus on back signs for getting them through it.
- A long walk to the race site and to the start line, and then returning from the finish line, which wasn’t the same as the start.
If you want to do an Ultra, sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon. Even though we were at the official race hotel, we had to leave by 5:45 a.m. and got to the race site at 7 a.m., shuffling in the moonlight, jets from Ronald Reagan Airport overhead, with a crowd of bewildered fellow-Metro runner travelers. We marched like Marines in a line from the Metro, finally reaching the Pentagon parking lot ringed by Portapotties.
The race was certainly worth doing, because Washington is worth seeing. The museums are free and amazing. Highlight of our trip was the panda couple and their baby at the national zoo.
Shaking off the rain at the race expo in the Armories, we identified with the t-shirts for sale that said, “This seemed like a good idea three months ago.” Heading home the day after the race, we agreed it had still been a good idea.
