The New York City Marathon took place the Sunday before last, and I enjoyed watching ongoing television coverage. Although there was a channel devoted to showing the top elite competition at the front, there were also several YouTube live feeds at different parts of the running course, depicting what was going on from the sidelines. The most compelling of these, which I watched in the early evening toward the event's end, showed 59th Street in Midtown Manhattan on the southern rim of Central Park, just one mile from the 26.2-mile race's finish line. There, exhausted and sometimes limping entrants mostly walked past the exhorting, shouting dude behind the camera as their impending finishing times crept higher and higher toward the seven-hour mark. This scenario...at least the part allowing the race's stragglers to finish without closing the course because of an imposed time deadline...made the NYC Marathon an open race. We used to have a couple of those in the marathon distance here in north central Florida, but sadly, no more. Let me explain...
My only "official" marathon...although I had run a practice one the week before in four hours and twenty-three minutes...was the Ocala Marathon of January 23, 2011. Regrettably, I sustained an IT band injury which hobbled me in the second half of the race, forcing me to walk slowly for its final seven miles. My time? Six hours and four minutes. I had also intended back then to run the next month's scheduled Gainesville Five Points of Life Marathon, but my need to recover cancelled that and I then resolved to stick to half-marathons as my longest racing distance. But lately I've been thinking it would be nice to have another go, if only for just one time, at a marathon-distance event. But both the Ocala and Five Points of Life marathons are no more, and the only other races of this distance in my area have very restrictive time limits. The biggest of these, the Florida Track Club's Mary Andrews Marathon next January, sets just five hours as its limit...even with good training and without any injuries, at my age (67) I would be hard-pressed to get a sub-five hour finishing time. So, although I sympathize with the race organizers who don't want to hang around waiting for someone to finally get to the finish line after seven or eight hours, I do think that since they are charging a hefty fee to enter the race in the first place then they should be more flexible with the allotted time and at least extend the limit to a more reasonable six hours. That is, if they're really interested in popularizing and growing the sport and not just stuck-up elitists. I think all public races, even the two extinct ones I extolled, have limits on finishing times. But since they're public, they should take that public in mind and avoid oppressively short limits on finishing times. Sadly, at least in my area, the opposite is happening...
I know I'll never give marathon running a try, but I don't at all like the idea of having that kind of time limit on an event such as that. It seems as if the purely amateur competitive sports are disappearing (where have all the bowling alleys gone?). Back in my high school days, on the weekends the softball diamonds would be full of community teams playing (my dad played on our church's team) and pretty much anybody who could get a team together could join. My favorite part of watching the online coverage of our local Iron Man Triathlon is getting the chance to see those at the very end who have still managed to make it past the finish line (I think there is a 17 hours time limit). .
ReplyDeleteI don't know, it seemed that this January marathon held way out in the boondocks was really set up to give locals a chance to get a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon in April, and the half-marathon was just thrown in to generate some income. Explains the time limit, too. After all, we no longer have the Lifesouth Five Points of Life marathon anymore to do that.
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