Sunday, February 14, 2010

Unlucky 13?

On February 13th, my friend Todd was to run his 13th marathon at the 13th running of the Myrtle Beach Marathon - but it was Canceled due to snow (2-4"). After postponing the start 30 minutes on Friday afternoon, they were making the decision at 10pm Friday night. Had already eaten a very nice pasta meal, decided what was to be worn (mostly anyway), watched snow come down and the Olympics on NBC waiting for the scroll at the bottom of the screen.
There it was:

Yep - Canceled.
Sat for another hour or two after the 10:30ish announcement - kind of at a loss. I do understand the decision had to be made - some will Obviously not be happy - but running with cars beside you traveling in the same direction? One patch of ice and that's it. Can you say lawsuit? I wouldn't be surprised if some idiot tried to sue them anyway. I at least only paid the $120 or so entry, no hotel, plane, etc.
I am Very disappointed, and maybe being in the mix of our local track club, can understand their decision (or rather - the city's).
My big question is what do I do now? Find another one (26.2 Run with Donna in Jacksonville next weekend?), start on my 50k training, Run Green Valley 10 miler next weekend and take a little time to decide (and pretend I ran one, taking my 3 week "break"?)?
One more note before I go (but there will be more posts on this!) - some people ran (or didn't) some part of the course and got medals. Who cares? I did at first - upset that they would even hand them out for a race that didn't happen, but then realized the medals mean Nothing. What does it mean to them? Hopefully - not that much. It just shows they got something for an event that didn't take place.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the real danger was for the people setting up at 4:00am or whathaveyou...I ran that morning and the roads were just wet -- no ice to be seen.

It looks like 2-3 miles of the Run With Donna are on sand. Boo! There's also Gasparilla (Tampa) in 2 weeks. Scott did that one a couple of years ago. It was fun. There were pirates.

Kathrin said...

So now we know... It's all Todd's vault! ;-)

I am also very dissapointed. The first thing I did was looking for another half and there is actually one in Columbia in two weeks. I guess, I'll do Green Valley next Saturday and then we'll see.

They actually handed out medals at the post race party. They engraved the date on the back of the medal, so they coudn't use them for next year.