St. George Groanings

ST. GEORGE GROANINGS

If you ever have the occasion to run a marathon, I would suggest you run the St. George Marathon. It's an incredible adventure and really, really fun. It seems like the entire city shows up to cheer you on, and the course is spectacular.

Racers are asked to gather at six A.M. in downtown St. George, and it is a strange sight to see people in running shorts and sweats gathered in October that early in the morning. It really looks like a lot of ghosts floating toward the same destination. They load you up on busses and drive you out to the starting line, twenty-six point two miles away.

As you are riding out on the bus, you can look around and see people older, younger, fatter and thinner than you. You get to wonder who will make it. People talk about other races they have done; if this is their first marathon; most of us look scared.

The bad news about being transported to the starting line is that you realize as you travel for 45 minutes that you have to run the entire way back, and you start wondering how much farther the bus will go. The farther the bus goes, the farther you will have to run. In my second and third marathons, I realized it was better to distract yourself somehow rather than consider the distance the bus was traveling.

When you reach the beginning of the race up Snow Canyon, you are a mile and a half higher than when you boarded the bus. That is both good and bad. At least you are running mostly downhill. During the next week, I will feel it in the bottom of my knees.

At the starting line there are massive fires burning at the side of the road. Music plays and porta-potties line the way. There are thousands of similarly crazy runners huddled around the fires since it's about 40 degrees or less outside. After a mile or two the temperature will feel great, but the race people do their best to keep you toasty before the race. Around the communal fire, the passion of running sparkles in the eyes of those gathered.

If you have worn sweats, they allow you to bag them up and put your number on them. Then they don't have to gather thousands of pieces of clothing along the 26 mile course since runners tend to shed clothing without a thought when they start heating up.

You throw your bag in the back of a big Ryder truck and the hundreds of bags are transported to the finish line and stacked by number on the tennis courts.

Then the race begins and if you have listened to instructions and followed the signs, you line up by the time you expect to finish. This avoids crowding the starting line, and when you are going to run for hours, being back from the starting line is not so bad. It might be 3 minutes before you even see the starting line after the gun if you run as slowly as I, and what's 3 minutes spread over 4 hours anyway.

Most of us don't start our watches until we cross the starting line anyway. That explains how our unofficial times are slower than the officially listed finishing time. We want the fast runners to get out of the way so we can concentrate on the rest of the course.

The only good advice I can give about running I learned from reading a jogging book, and it seems to work no matter what race I am running.

There is a volcano called Veyo in the first part of the race, which means we will be running uphill for a while. I run so slow uphill it may be mistaken for a stroll. I may be the only one who knows I am still running, which can be evidenced by my continually pumping knees. But I am not walking - I am running very, very slowly.

The hill usually kills most of us. But the secret to the hill is on the other side. We tend to have an established pace when we run on level ground, and most people keep up this pace on the downside of a hill.

But the advantage of gravity can give you a great boost when you are running a race. It doesn't take as much effort to run downhill, so most people rest on the downhill.

One of the greatest feelings in the world is to be doing well while others are struggling. With this technique, you really aren’t running faster, but just taking bigger steps.

It may be a small difference, but maybe what is eluding most of us is keeping up the same pace, but just taking bigger steps.

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