Our quick-strike trip up to Harvest Path was a success, but it wasn't exactly a recipe for relaxation. The Friday evening drive was a pain with storms. We did enjoy a pleasant Saturday with 1.01 and 1.02, which included lots of books, and other rainy-day activities. Then Sunday was a full day of the TC Marathon and the return drive home.
Let's give 1 and 1.1 the distinction of Daughter and Son-in-Law Of The Day for their successful completion of the marathon. This pic is actually from the Fargo Marathon earlier this year. The logistics yesterday never gave me a chance to get a shot of them together after the race. They haven't aged much since May, so this pic is still valid!
The marathon was pretty much the same as in prior years, so I was able to find my way around the course with few problems. There was one meet-point at Mile 19 that I almost missed because of a temporary loss of my internal compass, but other than that, it was Situation Normal. I saw 1 at our four pre-arranged markers, and we also met up pretty quickly at the Finish Line. And by parking in a Physician's Only spot at a nearby Public Clinic, our egress from downtown St. Paul was a snap as well.
I wasn't able to follow 1.1 throughout the race as the reality is that following one runner in this big of a race can be a huge task in and of itself. Its hard for the spectator to find a runner when there are these thousands of faces passing by a viewing point. And with the two of them at different paces, and the view-points requiring car travel to loop ahead of the race, there was simply no way to keep track of both runners.
The technology of Runner Tracking didn't work on my phone. Like most of these big races, you can sign up to receive Alerts on your runner that automatically go to your Smart Phone. When I signed up for both 1 and 1.1 on Saturday night, I got the immediate text message that I was in the system. That was the last text I received from their Alerts program. If I was depending on that system, I would of been an unhappy camper.
The biggest problem I had with my following-the-race task was reading the small-print map in the course book or on my iPad. The website has a decent map, but its just a pdf rendition of the map in the race book. You could enlarge it on the iPad, of course, but it wasn't inter-active to give you all the side streets. And I had to take off my glasses to read it anyway. And when I went to Google Maps to get details, you didn't have the course laid out and you had to understand the course to pick out the side streets. I really could have used 2 and her navigating skills for that Mile 19 mix-up.
The book-on-CD that we listened to on the trip was no better than a C-. Some radical Muslim, terrorist, spy-ish novel that ended up relying on some absurd coincidences to get to the ending. @srh4 theorized that the author was contractually obligated to have a certain number of pages in the book, so the last few chapters gave us a lot of useless, extraneous background on characters brought into the story in the last 20% of the book. Whatever. The book did shorten the drive so in that respect it was useful.
For those so interested, the Turkey Trot mailer hit my email this weekend. So the sign-up is open.
I'll try to jump back on the blog this evening. I always feel like these, "What I did on my weekend", entries don't ad much to the Book of Knowledge. Make a Good Monday in your world.
BCOT
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