Saturday, March 17, 2012

Momentary confusion

For today's Rock 'n' Roll USA race, I decided to switch to the half marathon, rather than running the full marathon for which I'd registered, partly because my 20-week training got interrupted several times and I didn't feel quite ready. It was perfect running weather, I had a smooth run, and my time was under my target of 2 hours. Now, to switch from marathon to half marathon, one would just follow the half marathon route to the finish line, instead of continuing on with the second half. The ChronoTrack timing would record the switch. My bib, however, still indicated full marathon. As I was approaching the finish line, the announcers were excitely calling out some of the bib numbers, hometowns, and finish times. Then, one of them said to the other, in a slghtly lowered and somewhat flummoxed voice, something like oh, there's a marathon finisher, ur, have to check this ... The momentary confusion likely resulted from my half marathon time being about 4 minutes faster than the world marathon time (2:03:38) set in the September 2011 Berlin Marathon by Patrick Makau of Kenya.