October 19th, 2008 saw me complete the second marathon of my young long-distance running career. In some ways I was nervous about it because of the long summer of what seemed like less training than I had put in for Knoxville. The big city pollution and traffic is a terrible condition for outdoor running, but I refused to buy a gym membership. People have told me stories of runners developing asthma from training in the city, but I’ll take my chances over running on the treadmill. On the other hand, Beijing was an extremely flat course and would go through parts of town that I knew fairly well. I was force to walk for about 5 minutes and even stopped to stretch once, but I can’t remember at what distance mark. I was met by many friendly encouragements along the way including the standard cheer, “Jia you!”, as well as many translations such as, “Hurry up!”, “Go faster”, and “Don’t walk!”.
Overall, my time was 7 minutes worse than in Knoxville, which is a little disappointing, but I’ve already signed up for the Hangzhou marathon in November to prevent the slip in distance ability.
This was my first large scale race with over 30,000 participants, so I didn’t know what to expect in terms of organization. Nevertheless, organization at this event was sub-par for what should have had some athletic motivation coming out of the Olympics.
The problems started with the bib number pick up in an outside part of town in a hard to find office. The computers weren’t finding the registrations, so people were getting frustrated, but it wasn’t such a big deal. Next, the bag drop off vans was poorly placed near the starting line crowd, so it was hard to even get to the buses, let alone to the correct one assigned to your number. These processes were not streamlined, but I generally forgot my frustration along the run.
I should not have been surprised that there was no fruit, let alone gels along the way as there had been in Knoxville. There were plenty of water and sports drink tables, but after 3 hours in, I was hungry and starting to feel weak! Thankfully, I noticed a big banner that said Tsinghua University on it in support of student runners. I laugh about it now, because they certainly had no idea who I was as I ran up trying to explain that I was a student in need of a banana. I didn’t even know how to say banana, haha, but they gave me one, and it was marvalous. Half was enough to give me a boost, so I gave the rest to another foreign runner that happened to look in bad shape as well.
Finally finishing, after the false run-by of the stadium, I just wanted to get my medal, my food bag, and sit down. Unfortunately, they had turned the finish line into a bottleneck where the finishers had to form a single file line to be handed stuff. This was mayhem as people were tired, some were pushing, and volunteers were keeping competitors from leaving the area any other way. I have trouble describing how terrible it was so see people acting out of frustration and exhaustion. It was so contrary to the celebratory atmosphere it should have been.
I eventually made it out and got all of my gear. Being taller and a different color than the crowd helped, but also being calm and patient made the volunteers want to help me more than those that were fighting them for whatever.
The finishing t-shirt looks awesome, and I am a 3XL.
Congrats to Jesse for finishing his first marathon!
