I ran my sixth half-marathon this weekend, and it may have been the weirdest one yet.
Usually, when you run a half or full marathon, it’s your big race of the season. It’s the culmination of a long training program, and it’s one you sign up for months in advance. It’s a carefully chosen race, maybe one with historical or personal significance, a destination race in a far-away metropolis, or one you hope will qualify you for one of the major races in Boston, Chicago, or New York.
But this was a spur-of-the moment decision. While I had been looking at it for a while, I only decided to run it Thursday morning. I signed up for it Friday afternoon. I ran it Saturday evening.
It was the Midnight Madness Marathon in Hamilton, Ohio. In addition to a full and half-marathon, it had relay races, a 10K, and a running to midnight 5K, which started at 11:30. Some 400 people ran one of the races.
It’s not an historic race; this past weekend was its premier running. The city can hardly be called a vacation paradise — it’s a gritty little town in Butler County, a northern suburb of Cincinnati on the banks of the Great Miami River. It has little personal meaning, as I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in the city.
But it seemed like it would be a fun trip. The event was at night, so I figured I’d get to sleep late on a Saturday morning — a day I am usually out and running before dawn.
It was a race I had not particularly trained for, although I have been running 25 to 28 miles a week for the past month. In essence, it was a 13.1-mile, $80 training run, on a night scheduled to be hot, humid and stormy, in a town I’d never seen — what could go wrong?
As it turned out, very little.
I drove up with a couple of running friends — Jennifer Trenkamp, Tamara Farmer of Burlington, and Matt Trenkamp of Erlanger. Matt, in fact, had planned on running two half-marathons that day — the Rugged Red trail half through the Red River Gorge in south-central Kentucky, and the Midnight Madness — but wound up with a severely twisted ankle. So he passed on the Rugged Red, and ran a 10K instead of the half in Hamilton, “I’m going to finish one race today,” he said.
Jennifer and Tamara also had good runs, placing 2nd and 3rd, respectively, in their age group. Tamara also achieved a personal best time of 2:26.55.
It was a fun trip. Well, for the most part.
The thunderstorms began about 5 p.m., just as we were leaving, and we had to drive the hour north in the pouring rain. The race started late, so we had to hang around the arts center where it started. But the center had bathrooms, and the weather was cooling down, so things were looking up.
The marathoners went off first, about 20 minutes late, and we half-marathoners started about 7:45 p.m., some 15 minutes after the scheduled start. No one told us why it started later, but I suspect it was to set up the course and the mile markers after the storm. I also figure that the storm held up a lot of people, and the organizers wanted to make sure everyone who wanted to be there got there.
So, the organizers promised a nice, flat course, and that is what we got. They also promised all the roads would be closed, and they were — and many of those looked like major roads through town. They promised plenty of aid stations with water and Gatorade along the way, and they had one about every two miles.
They also promised a well lit path. But here is where more weirdness crept in.
The course was a 6.55-mile loop around town, along the roads to the Great Miami River, then up on a bike path back to the start. Marathoners did four laps; half-marathoners did two. The 10K did one loop, turning around a bit sooner to get the right distance.
And boy, did the organizers get the distance right. Exactly right. Each time I passed a mile marker for my laps, my watched buzzed to note it also was checking off another mile. When I checked my watch for the other laps, and calculated the distance yet to run, it was precise, to the hundredth of a mile.
About those laps. Normally, multiple loops on a course are a bane to runners. Passing that finish line and continuing on to your second loop is hard — I cannot imagine going around for a third or fourth time. Multiple loops also make the run boring. After the first time around, there is nothing new to see. Each lap gets progressively harder.
This was different. Maybe it was because the first lap was between dusk and night, while the second was all dark, giving a different perspective each time. Maybe it was the nice flatness of the course. Or maybe it was the flowing river along most of the route.
It seemed the second time around was easier than the first.
And that gets us back to the lighting. The final two miles of each lap was along a bike path parallel to the river. It was dark. Lights from nearby streets kinda, sorta lit up parts of the path, but not very well. Fortunately, I wore my headlamp. But when I turned it on during the first lap, the bugs decided it was a nice light to fly into.
It was just after dark, still humid, and the bug swarms were intense. I wound up breathing some in and swallowing others. Yep, it was that gross. Trying running in the dark with your head turned down and away so you can breath without bug attacks.
But the second time around, the bugs were gone. It was later and cooler and less humid. Or perhaps I just ate enough of them on lap one that they learned to avoid me.
Paul Long writes weekly for the NKyTribune about running and runners. For his daily running stories, follow him at dailymile.com or on Twitter @Pogue57