Kissing Bricks, Part 2

More on the Indianapolis half-marathon. It was perfect weather even though they had predicted rain all day. And the course is completely flat. There was a ramp leading up to the Indy 500 track. That was the only real change in elevation. That should have led to an incredibly fast time, but alas, it did not. Part of that is because I wanted to enjoy myself. I started slow and then picked it up. Most people start too fast and slow down. Because of that, I bet I passed, literally, at least a couple thousand runners. That was satisfying. Another reason my time was a little slow is I'm a little slow. Everything I run now seems to be twice as slow as what I used to be able to do in my wonder years. The 2.5 mile lap on the Indy track took 26 minutes. It used to be able to run that far in 13 minutes. I ran the race as a whole at an 11 minute pace. Before I could have done it under 6. I suppose I could run a little faster if I trained more, but that would take a lot of time and effort. I'm not sure I'm into that. And would it really have been worth it to finish in 14,000th place instead of 15,000th? That would still put me substantially out of the running for the gold medal. There really isn't any good place to train where I'm at. At best, I'd run a couple times during the week and then try for a relatively long run in Cumberland Gap. On the positive side, I finished slightly in the top half of the starters. Again, being positive, while a few people beat me, I beat 14,000 people in this race. In that sense its my best race ever. Hurray for me.

Usually during a race of this length you spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts. That isn't good because in a race of this length, most of your thoughts are suicidal. But this was such an entertaining race, that there were lots of positive distractions. There were cheerleaders and bands throughout the course. The bands did reggae, rap, country, rock - the whole spectrum. There was a rock band playing Don't Fear the Reaper, complete with cowbell. This of course let to a bunch of the runners shouting out "More cowbell". Probably my favorite was the banjo/accordion duet of the Chicken Dance. Classic.

A lot of runners had entertaining shirts, such as "I thought it said Rum" or "My wife told me this was a 5K". There were a lot of signs in support of friends or relatives running. I didn't have that, although the sign "Way to Go, Complete Stranger" gave me a sense of encouragement.