West Florida Marathon Blues

Are marathons declining, or is there something specific to the area of (peninsular, not panhandle) western Florida that discourages them? The Sarasota Marathon was cancelled this year, with the race being changed to a purely half-marathon event. This year's Tampa Bay Gasparilla Festival Marathon just held its final run and will be no more. And the Florida Sheriff Youth's Ranch moved its annual marathon from the Sarasota vicinity to far-northern Florida this year, a few miles from Live Oak at that ranch's location.

I know that these marathon/half-marathon events tend to draw many more half-marathon participants than those running the marathon, so the event organizers can see that their funding comes primarily from the shorter race. And the longer marathon, if it doesn't simply involve repeating the half-marathon course or retracing back, will take up an additional 13.1 miles of public roads that require temporary lane closures and police supervision. So from a cost-effective analysis perspective, some may be seeing marathons as something of a waste, while half-marathons are growing in popularity. At least that seems to be how Sarasota acted. I do know that I would be awfully disappointed if I lived in that area.

In other places, though, marathons still seem to be thriving. Jacksonville, as a matter of fact, holds two each year. My home town of Gainesville seems pretty happy with its LifeSouth Five Points of Life marathon in February, so perhaps what has been transpiring around Tampa and Sarasota is an anomaly. If so, it would be nice if some other organizations would step up to the plate and engineer new races for this area, where distance running is obviously very popular.

I would hate to see, just I am beginning to come into my own as a marathon runner, for this genre of race to begin to decline. But then again, I may find that, once I have passed the personal milestone of actually covering the 26.2 miles of a marathon, I may prefer to concentrate on half-marathons instead. For now, though, it's marathon time for me.