We're in Dallas over the weekend for the "Big D Marathon," a big marathon but not the biggest in the Metroplex. Anyway, Alan was registered for the half-marathon which is about 13 miles. (I'm giving the distance, because I've discovered how many people don't know how long a marathon is.) The race starts at 7:30 a.m., so we plan to be there by 7:00. BIG mistake. Turns out that Sunday morning traffic on marathon day is pretty ridiculous. We were parking the car at 7:30, and the distance from our parking spot to the starting line was way the heck out there.
So he gets to the race and they've already pulled up the starting mats for the half-marathon; therefore Alan can't find where his race starts. Long story short: they direct Alan to the wrong starting line, which was the starting line for the 5K, he runs part of the 5K and back, runs across I-30 and into part of the Dallas ghetto, whereupon multiple dogs begin chasing him, finally makes it to the half-marathon start after he's already been running for about 50 minutes. Rather than run 13 miles, he ran about 17 minimum.
I was at the finish line getting PISSED that he was so late, with thoughts such as "where the hell are you?", "why are you so slow?", "old women are beating you!", etc. I was having a hard time being patient and loving, because what I was really thinking was that something bad happened....he broke something, was on the way to the ER, etc. I knew there was no way he should be taking that long.
Finally he crosses the finish line about 45 minutes late and says, "Have I got a story for you." Of course you do. I'd expect nothing less.
1 comment:
I think that may be a common problem for those of us who didn't grow up in the big city. I had a hard time for a while realizing that it might take more than 15-30 minutes to get somewhere because of that little thing called traffic.
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