A day at the races

What I need is an all-purpose excuse. Something to cover all possible dates, times and circumstances. For instance, when my coworker asked me last month what I was doing on August 31, I should have been ready with “tiling my bathhouse” or “rehabilitating my camel.” Instead, I looked at her dumbly and said “I ‘unno.”

There was no backing out of it then. “It” was a 13.1-mile road race that my coworker had not sufficiently trained for, and so wanted to run as a relay of 6.55 miles apiece. This is a not- undoable distance for me, and August 31 still seemed so far off back in those heady days of July, and so I agreed.

Which is how I came to be running yesterday in the most disorganized race in the 13-billion-year history of the universe. The very first race, organized by cave people with only rocks and vines to use as communication devices, could not have been more disorganized than this one was. It was a half-marathon that boasted an “all-downhill” course, which was achieved by starting in the 'burbs and ending up downtown. Makes sense, except that there was no parking permitted at the starting line. Everyone had to park downtown, and then shuttles were supposed to transport us to the starting line. The race was supposed to start at 7:30, and so the last shuttle was supposed to leave from downtown at 6:35.

Notice that all of these things were “supposed” to happen.

What really happened was this: the bus driver picked up his very first load of runners right as I was turning into the parking lot at 6:15 or so. I parked my car and watched the taillights of the shuttle disappear into the predawn, then gathered up my safety pins and race number and jogged across the parking lot to where the next shuttleful of runners was already forming. There, while everyone else jogged around and chatted in pairs or small groups, I stood by myself and felt the coffee quit my brain and head for my bladder.

The sky brightened. More joggers showed up. My relay partner arrived, as did two of the other people she’d convinced to run the race (I’d kill for her powers of persuasion). The sky brightened further. My bladder grew fuller. A woman with a clipboard assured everyone that the shuttle was “on its way” and was “only a few minutes away.”

The start time of the race, 7:30, came and went. The woman with the clipboard suggested that everyone try to get our warm-up in now rather than wait till we got to the starting line, thus manifesting even further the stupidity that had compelled her to stand before a group of anxious runners with a clipboard. People gathered around her with questions and complaints. Meanwhile, the possibility that there would not be time for me to visit a bathroom prior to the race began to gnaw at me. Surely not, I mused. As anyone who has run in a race before knows, restrooms are very important to the runner’s pre-race routine—possibly more important than a warm-up. (Or maybe I just drink too much coffee.)

When the bus finally arrived at 7:35 or so, the story came out that the original bus driver, the one I’d seen pulling out as I was driving in, had picked up the runners, dropped them off and then gone home. A second bus driver then had to be summoned from bed and brought in to pick us up. This should have been funny, but I was too busy worrying about the restroom situation at the starting line. I worried about it for the whole 13.1 miles up to the starting line, but no amount of worrying could have prepared me for the scene when we got there.

“Get your timing chips here!” shrieked a new woman with a clipboard, looking significantly more wild-eyed than her predecessor. To her left were the dozens of runners who had been milling around for the past hour or so, some of them elite runners from Africa and across the US. To her right were two full-sized charter buses packed out with more runners, all of us needing to be outfitted with chips. The time was 7:50.

“Where is your bib number?” the crazed-clipboard-woman shrieked at the man in line in front of me. He stammered something in hesitant English, clearly terrified. He’d forgotten his race number, the one that you’re supposed to pin to your shirt during the race, and so now the woman could not properly match him up with a timing chip.

“Are you an elite runner?” she shrieked. The man looked confused. The clipboard woman struggled to control herself. “Are you. An elite. Runner,” she said to the man, as though he were an idiot. He quaked and said something unintelligible.

At that point, I decided that finding a bathroom was much more important than getting a timing chip. I asked a less volatile-looking race official where the facilities were, and she pointed off in the distance. No, not to where all the male runners were lined up to pee in the bushes, but waaaaaaaay beyond that, across a distant field. I got my warm-up in by sprinting across the field to the porta-potties.

That business taken care of, I returned to fetch my timing chip. Crazed-clipboard-woman handed me a chip while tersely explaining to me something about not having enough chips for the relay runners, and so when I finished the race I would have to take the chip to the blue H-tent and explain to them that although this was my chip, I was not who the chip said I was. Confused, my brain reeling with the philosophical implications, I nodded and backed away. I had no idea what the “blue H-tent” was, but was confident that it would become apparent eventually.

And then, blessedly, the race began.

Because it was the least interesting portion of the event, I’ll skip the actual race part, except to mention something that happened right after I finished. I had handed off the existential quandary of the timing chip to my relay partner and gotten myself a bottle of water, then wandered over to sit at a picnic table and watch the runners go by. As with many other races I’ve been in, the organizers felt the need to blast bad rock music out of several tall speakers, perhaps believing that this would help inspire the runners rather than make them feel like a carload of hillbillies had just pulled up alongside them. A bunch of noise that may have been a Lynrd Skynrd cover blasted for awhile, and then another song came on, one of those loud, angry, utterly bland faux-punk songs with the shouting and the predictable chord progressions. I had mostly managed to tune it out, but then my ears, ever-vigilant, picked up an F-bomb.

I looked around me, at the runners coming through and the families and strollers and children lining the trail. This portion of the race ran through a park, so there were also lots of folks completely unaffiliated with the race out enjoying the day. Did I really just hear the F-bomb? I wondered. An F-bomb, blasted at, like, 700 decibels from the official race speakers?

But I needn’t have wondered, because moments later, another F-bomb was dropped, then another. They became so numerous, and (to me) so unspeakably hilarious, that I got out my cell phone and started texting myself the lyrics of the song, because I didn’t want to forget them.

What the fuck is wrong with me?!!!!

Put me out of my fucking misery!!!!!

Below the speakers the runners plugged onward through the heat. None of them seemed to pay much attention to the discouraging anthem being blasted at them, but that could be because they were too involved in their own internal worlds of pain. It was an awfully hot day, after all, and they were only halfway to the end.

Ah, the end. By the time I and the other relay runners rode the shuttle bus to the finish line, pausing for about a half-hour in the traffic jam that our own race had created, I was really to throw in the towel and go home. But of course I couldn’t leave yet, because I had to wait for my relay partner to finish. I should mention at this point that she had come down with a horrible bladder infection three days before the race, and probably would have been better off spending the morning lying in bed in the air-conditioning rather than running 6.55 miles in the by-then blazing heat. But she had insisted on running, by God, so who was I to stop her?

I cheered as she approached the finish line, then remembered that I had to catch her and tell her to go to the blue H-hut to tell them that she was not who the chip said she was. But it was too late—by the time I caught up with her beyond the finish line, she had already dropped the chip in a giant bin of timing chips, thus disqualifying us. This bothered me at first, but then I thought back over the events of the morning. In the end, I realized that I was happy to have my name disassociated with this race.

And now, off to work on my all-purpose excuse.