Ann Arbor, MI - Friday, June 7 - Sunday, June 9
This weekend has been looming large in my thoughts for months now. When we were first planning our trip I somehow thought it would be a good idea to include a long distance race in the first half of it, and the internet being what it is before I thought too much about it I was registered for the second annual Ann Arbor Marathon.
Never been to Ann Arbor. I hear it’s nice.
This will be my fifth marathon. My last one was at Walt Disney World in January but I was doing Goofy’s Race and a Half Challenge in 85 degree heat so I was just trying to finish. (By real runner’s standards that’s all I ever do. My average minutes per mile just got below 9 this year. I am only using the improvement I've seen to call it good.)
When we get to Ann Arbor, Leighann wants a picture in nearby Ypsilanti, since a book series she likes is set there. We see a sign for Eastern Michigan University, but my first thought is of a bald ostrich perched majestically in front of a flag.
If anyone reading this is handy with Photoshop all I can say is, "Please?!"
We have an unrelated revelation: we like Thai food all the time. It is our hamburger, our baloney sandwich. There is no meal where it is not an option worth considering, and the only question is do we want curry, drunken noodles, pad thai, or fresh springs rolls (if it’s breakfast/brunch).
At Thai-Thai in Ypsilanti we splurge to order curry AND pad thai, and we have no regrets, not one. Other customers may have fared less well, suggests a sign on the bathroom.
The sky goes all kaleidoscope as we head toward the hotel, and I wonder for a second if anyone has ever died taking a picture of a sunset while driving. If so I bet it caused an accident.
On Saturday we hit the race expo to pick up my runner’s bib and swag. It is the smallest marathon expo we’ve seen. Many small races forego this part and just hand you your bib and t-shirt. Not Ann Arbor. Their expo takes up a whole cul-de-sac inside the local mall, wedged between a department store entrance and a pile of dirt and rubble with a sign reading, “Pardon Our Construction.”
Though modest, the expo is a good pre-race resource, including the two most important freebies: massages and cow bells. There are also pens, stickers and an uncommon proximity to a Pinkberry.
Honestly I would take an expo in someone’s driveway over a mere bib pick-up, because it makes you feel official. It helps pull the recliner out from under your inner athlete: Hey, you. It’s time.
Our good friend Jason joins us, having driven from his home in Milwaukee, and we while away the day at our hotel, knowing that our recent breach of Eastern Time will make the 6:30am start feel like 5:30. Who picked this race again?
I don’t know if I sleep more than a couple of hours. I doze, but my brain is on high alert, like a race is going to burst through the door any minute and make me run.
It’s finally time to get up and get dressed, and I don’t feel much more rested than at Disney World, where we had to get up at 2:30am to catch a bus, walk a mile to the starting line, then sit an hour in our corral. At least here we’re only ten minutes from the start.
Jason hasn’t trained like he wanted to and is relying on his base from being a lifelong runner to get him to the finish line. Since I’ve been able to put in more training miles recently he tells me not to worry about hanging back with him, and that I should pursue a “PR.” (note: PR is runner’s lingo for Personal Best. I think the B is just stretching its leg.)
My PR is from more than a year ago at the 10th annual Little Rock Marathon, where I posted 4:53:33. Not the worst (as I proved on three other occasions) but very slow for a thirty-year-old male.
The starting line is at the top of a hill so they are giving us a little push out of the nest. When the air horn sounds the crowd rolls its way down and I feel strong and awake. The course turns away from town very early and by the fourth mile we are running past the woodlands and river views for which I think I remember hearing about Ann Arbor at some point.
Mile six comes and goes and I still feel like a champion, despite more hills than I’ve trained on and stretches of road patchy enough to be a concrete tire course. I overhear the runners next to me talking, and apparently one of them is running his third marathon within 90 days, one of the ways to qualify for the Marathon Maniacs running club. Another chimes in that he has done four marathons a month and two half marathons a week since the beginning of the year. “It’s just not fun anymore,” he laments. I do not feel your pain, sir, and never want to.
The stretch between miles 8 and 13 contains two out-and-backs, where you leave the main course for a certain distance then turn around and head back to it. They can be psychologically debilitating because you have to watch all the people ahead of you stream by and you can’t even see how long before you get to be them, at the same point but facing the other way. It’s like a horizontal hill.
Also a vertical one, in the case of Ann Arbor. Steady climbs are everywhere and by the time I cross the 13.1 mile marker I have to give myself my first walking break. I begin rationing my strength, trying a trick I did in training where I let myself walk some during the even number miles and run the odd miles without stopping. This works until mile 17, where we head up a switchback trail that reminds me of Pinnacle Mountain. It feels like a solid mile, and as we get back into town at the top, sure enough, we pass the sign for mile 18.
This is the portion of the race where many people hit “The Wall,” the point at which you feel you can’t go further and have to start playing a mental game to continue. The inclusion of the tallest hill on the course at this exact moment feels like some sort of misplaced pride. “What do you mean you don’t train on potholes and steep hills? Oh I keep forgetting, you’re not from Ann Arbor!”
If they’re trying to wear down outsiders, it's working. My legs feel spent. The inconvenience is I still have eight miles to go. I make a deal with myself that I can walk as much as I want of the even miles if I will still try to run the odd ones. Maybe the average won’t be too bad. Midway through mile 18 I realize I have passed and been passed by the same woman about four times. She seems to be struggling as much as I am. I say hello and we talk about how much hillier this course is than we expected.
It turns out we have the same PR down to the minute, and she has come here hoping to beat hers too. Unlike me, she has a running watch and GPS. I suggest we run intervals together the rest of the way, and that she use her watch to make sure we’re staying ahead of our goal. We are soon making bets about how far we can go at a time.
“Do you think we can run to that bridge?” I say.
“Do you think we can run 30 seconds past that bridge?” she counters.
This is the benefit of team sports, and it is particularly helpful on this course because the race makers haven’t finished their assault on our resolve. Miles 19-22 take us down a hill to yet another out-and-back, this time around the mall where the expo was. The view is the same during every step of that circle, and I have never felt so much like I made a wrong turn and am just running down the middle of the road. At the end of this suburban monotony, we have to head back up the hill, past the finish line, and up another hill for a final out-and-back. Some runners are cursing audibly at this point but I have to save every breath.
The only redemption: when we turn around for the last time there is less than a mile to go and it’s all downhill. We glide like Emu Eagles onto the astro-turf of the University of Michigan’s, er, band practice field. Whatever, it’s soft and you can lie down on it, so I do, and enjoy having a single, sensibly sized medal for a change.
I finish in 4:48:43.
And I vow to take an hour off of that someday. Even if I do it five minutes at a time.
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