A 6 Foot Tall Banana, Scooby Doo, and A Sprint Finish

Let me be very clear with something. I am not a fast marathon runner. By all intents and purposes I probably should be though. I'm tall and lean and built like a long distance runner. I'm from a pretty decent athletic past having knocked around the minor leagues, held my own against some inner city DC's best hoops players, and for the most part been involved in a ton of sports from a young age. At this point in my life I run 5-6 times per week, I've turned in some somewhat good 5k times (18:30), 10k times (37:00), and 20k times (1:32:00), and managed my way across runs as long as 100km at a time in places like the Sahara Desert. However despite all of this and to the detriment of my precious ego, I am not a fast marathon runner.

For 90% of the year, frankly, I'm fine with this fact. I don't even think about it and for the most part it rarely ever even comes up. However, it's those moments when I show up to the start of a marathon that this little tidbit becomes excruciating.

Those of you who've never run a marathon may not be aware that runners in large marathons are grouped by their estimated finishing time. Sometimes they're grouped in numbers, sometimes letters, or in my case for Sunday's Brighton Marathon, by colors. For example, the Elite runners wear a purple race bib and line up in the area labeled Purple, the estimated 3 hour finishers wear a pink race bib and line up in the area labeled Pink, the estimated 3 hour 15 minute finishers wear a green bib, etc, etc, etc....This prevents an Elite runner from getting stuck in the back of thousands of other runners and spending his or her first 20 minutes trying to fight to the front of the pack as well as preventing someone with an estimated 6 hour finishing time from being trampled into the asphalt and becoming a human speed bump for the seething horde of runners rushing up behind them.

My starting color for the Brighton Marathon was orange. Despite orange's great affiliation with all things fast like flames, and rockets, and the General Lee, orange meant an estimated finishing time of 4:15:00 to 4:30:00.

Now, before I go any further let me put something in context here. Accompanying my 'sporty' background has been the ability to immediately 'size up' the competition. You can tell a lot about how someone walks, how they carry themselves, and hell, even by what kind of gear they're wearing. Walking up to Preston Park for the start of the Inaugural Brighton Marathon in my RacingthePlanet gear and USA sleeve patches I looked like a force to be reckoned with. Just looking at me certainly you'd think that I must be finding my way to one of the fast groups. How wrong you would be. Sauntering arrogantly up to the starting area I found my group and took serious stock of my 'competition'...ah yes,...a 58 year old slightly overweight grandmother of 3, a retired airplane engine mechanic in jean shorts, a 6 foot tall penguin, a guy dressed as a banana, a 62 year old woman competing in her 14th marathon in the last 14 days pulling a 20lb wooden cart, a guy dressed like Scooby Doo, and 6'6" bald guy wearing 4 foot wide fairy wings and a ballet tutu....and I thought the Olympics wasn't until 2012...

I was almost fine with all of this until the 58 year old woman turned to Scooby Doo and said 'I did London in 4 hours so I think I might go for that again today...' If you heard a loud popping sound on Sunday that would've been the sound of my ego exploding.

We could not have asked for a better day to take in the stunning beauty of Brighton and it's wonderful seafront, Regency architecture, rolling hills, and dramatic chalk cliffs. The crowd turned out with as much if not more force than the sunshine and certainly as the race got longer they outshone it. Winding our way around Preston Park down through the narrow medieval 'Laines', past George V's famous Royal Pavilion, and up Madeira drive I slowly gained on the bizarro cast of super heroes in the Orange group. 6 foot tall banana...check, bald guy with fairy wings and tutu...check, 62 year woman's cart....check, 62 year old woman....check. And so on and so on, and as I stalked Scooby Doo somewhere around mile 10 I realized that these events mean so many different things to so many different people and that their successes or failures in events like this are completely and unashamedly relative. For some it's measured on winning, for others perhaps it's measured against a time, and for some others still it's on completion. Some run for charity, some in honor or memory of lost loved ones, and others for the sport of it all.

Regardless of their reason or their goal, what I realized, as yes I did blow past Scooby Doo, is that all of these people set their sights on something. They signed up. They put in mile after mile after mile of training. They passed on Happy Hour with co-workers down at the Pub. They showed up. One thing that will always come through in posts of mine from time to time is that I love the human spirit, and it was alive on Sunday.

I leave you with a picture of me roughly 100m from the finish line in a full sprint attempting to pass a 5'2" girl dressed like a pixie...

Don't worry, I caught her and finished in 3:49:25...Grandma didn't stand a chance

The human spirit is powerful guys. Go for it.

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