In October of 2015, I had scheduled a tight weekend of running. Saturday I would run the Petrified Forest Marathon out in Arizona and then fly back that night to run the inaugural Cocoa Beach Half Marathon in Florida. The latter was inspired by the setting of I Dream of Jeannie and going to feature a replica of Jeannie’s bottle as the medal.
On paper it was a nearly perfect plan. I had time to finish my marathon, shower at my hotel before checking out, make the drive back to the Flagstaff airport and catch my connecting flight back East. And on the day, it went like clockwork — I ran a very respectable 3:38:27 and got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. But a mechanical issue with our small aircraft meant the flight kept getting delayed… and delayed… and delayed. And ultimately the flight was cancelled. The tiny Flagstaff airport didn’t have a lot of flights in or out and so even with rebooking on a flight to LAX and then back to Florida, I would get into Orlando at 7 am on Saturday morning. The race in Cocoa Beach, about 45 minutes from the airport, was set to start at 8 AM. It was still possible to pull this off… until my red-eye flight out of LA had mechanical trouble too and we were delayed three hours there in the dead of night.
All of this is a long, roundabout way of explaining two things:
1) American Airlines continues to be a terrible airline for me despite my having banked literally millions of miles in their frequent flier program.
and
2) I’ve been on the mailing list of the Cocoa Beach Half Marathon ever since… which is why I received this message amidst a wave of Covid-19 warnings:
Because I’m always up for a running challenge, I paypal’d my fees and set out to do them all in a week.
Despite some high humidity and blazing temperatures most days (85-95% and low 90s), I was mostly able to achieve my goal. One notable exception was a disastrous DNF on Tuesday the 14th. I was really struggling and then around mile 9 my Garmin watch battery died… meaning even if I finished I wouldn’t know my time. This is the bitter dilemma of a runner — if it’s not recorded on my GPS watch, did it really happen? It did, of course, but I just ran out of oomph… and walked myself home dripping with sweat from exertion and direct sunlight through water-heavy-air.
I used to be able to do week-long series of marathons. I had a tough time getting through these halfs… and each day I was sure I could NOT go another 13.1 miles. That was a bit… dispiriting.
As I find myself all too often saying during these crazy times, it is what it is.