The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Absurd!

Now that my racing career has ended, (Although I will try to run a 10K at 70 if I’m still out there!) I thought it might be fun to recount some of my racing history over 45 years. Did run over 600 races during that period. I will put these in no real order, and just throw some things out there that were successes, failures, and just strange tales!

2 funny ones to start.....during my early 30’s, I ran 60 consecutive 5K’s at a sub 6 minute per mile pace. Now part way thru, for motivation, I would pick out someone in the field, and decide that I had to beat them. Last did that in Philly with Terry and Billy at age 58. They took me to a race where a guy drove up to the race dressed in Nike lance armstrong everything....shoes, sox, hat, singlet, shades, Warm up jacket etc....I told Terry and Billy, the guy drove from Jersey in a car worth about $300 and had $600 of lance shit on him. So I said I had to beat him and I did. But at 35, at a small race in a small Ohio town near the Pennsylvania border, I was warming up with a friend, and saw a guy with a singlet on backwards and Bermuda shorts....told him “there’s my mark”. I ran 17:58, he ran 16:30....lesson, never assume you can beat someone based on their attire!
Now, shortly after retiring and moving to Mesquite NV, I was trying to train harder than I had in the previous 5 years. Had my eye on the Huntsman World Senior Games Half marathon. (Will cover that in a later post) Anyway, I had promised Deb I wouldn’t run any more marathons or ultras. But then at the rec center, I saw this flyer for a downhill marathon starting at 6,000 feet and ending at 2200 feet finishing a half mile from my house. Found that irritating. It was the weekend before Memorial Day. The promoters were promising records and Boston qualifying. Now I had lived in mesquite a year, and temps in late May normally run 105-7 degrees. Participants were to be bussed up to the start, with the start time scheduled for 5:45 AM. Well, Deb drove me up and dropped me off, and the busses didn’t get everyone up there until 6:30. The gun went off at 6:45. By 8, it was 90. By 9, 100. When I finished at 10:30, was 107. Amazed I made it and didn’t die. One runner did, and 2 others were carted away with heat stroke. No records or qualifiers occurred.  Luckily I didn’t see the guy die. That would unfortunately happen 5 years later. The sweet lady dragging me to the fluid table was Marge. She was my downstairs condo neighbor and loved me like a son......