2006 Marine Corps Marathon O-V-E-R

The 2006 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC is over. I did my usual sub-3-hour time, finishing just under 2 hours and 54 minutes. This was good enough for a 75th overall finish out of almost 21,000 runners. A 56-year-old guy collapsed and died from a heart attack at mile 17, and another guy had a heart attack just before the start. It was a cold 40 degrees at the start (8:35 am), so I had to wear a couple of shirts, gloves and a hat. But it warmed up very quickly and by mile 8 I was wearing no extra clothes. The race was OK until we crossed the bridge by the Lincoln Memorial into Washington DC from Virginia. That's when the most incredible wind kicked up. It never let up and it made me so disgusted throughout the next 18 miles that I just kept repeating "this sucks, last marathon, never again" to myself. I really didn't enjoy the race at all, but I did stare at the Washington Memorial, the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial and the Pentagon as I ran past them. I also got the most incredible yellow long-sleeve mock turtle shirt in my race packet. I'm sorry to say that that was the best thing about the whole race. On Saturday afternoon, I had to stand in line 2 hours to collect it along with my race number and other stuff. The security was tight and they had to wand everyone--all 32,000 runners and their 32,000 other friends and family members. Really pissed my off. Prior to that, I walked over to the Pentagon to check out the last 2 miles of the course, but couldn't get through since the course was actually on an active expressway. My hotel was right across from the Pentagon and you could see where they repaired the building after 9/11 from my window.

On the morning of the race, I took the (very crowded) subway over to the start. Then I had to walk 1-1/2 miles back to the Athlete's Village to drop off my gear and another 1-1/2 miles back to the start. So I actually did 29.2 miles instead of 26.2. When I got to the start, they were not regulating where people lined up, so there were tons of slower runners in my corral who had no business being there. So when the starting gun went off, I was stuck for about 2 minutes behind a bunch of people running 4 minutes per mile slower than me. I politely moved people aside and uttered a few "excuse mes" to get by. The race also started 15 minutes behind schedule so I had virtually no cushion to get back to my hotel to shower and get out of there before the noon check out. I finished at 11:30 am and then quicky retrieved my gear (which was a half mile away from the finish line in Rosslyn) and headed for the subway. I blew into the hotel at 11:58 am, took a quick shower and checked out 15 minutes later.

Since I had a meeting in Baltimore on Monday, I walked from the hotel back over to the subway and took it to the end of the Green Line, then caught the express bus to Baltimore Airport (BWI). From there I caught the Marriot Hotel shuttle to my hotel, where I immersed myself in the whirlpool for 30 minutes to soothe my aching quads. Then I went over to Wendy's for quick bite to eat, then met up with my colleagues at the hotel where we had a meeting from 7:30-9:00 Sunday night. Sunday was quite a day. We had another meeting from 8 am to 1 pm today, then I caught a flight back to Milwaukee. Monday was a long day too. I'm glad to be home.