{"id":43466,"date":"2024-10-06T14:48:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-06T18:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=43466"},"modified":"2024-10-06T14:48:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-06T18:48:00","slug":"the-long-beach-marathons-40th-anniversary-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=43466","title":{"rendered":"The Long Beach Marathon’s 40th Anniversary Event"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

It turns out I and an Otter Pop are my worst enemies. Also the merging of half marathoners and marathoners at mile 24. But I get ahead of myself…

The Long Beach Marathon moved up its start time to 5:30 out of high temperature fears. They proved to be unfounded… as did the 5:30 start time. As they waited for the all clear on the course from the police… and telling us it would just be a fe minutes… then a few minutes more… then, ya know, a few few more minutes… I experienced the rage I feel at airports when the flight delays are moved in minute increments when CLEARLY the delay is going to be longer. We’re clearly not departing in five minutes when we’re all still in the gate area. I suppose this is slightly different as we are all scrunched together into the corral, waiting to go… but still. I was just in a grouchy Hulk Smash berserker mood.<\/p>\r\n

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And I’ve run this race before. A few times<\/a>. And parts of the course have been used for other events I’ve done over the years. So segments I know quite well… and yet I always forget the “annoyingly but not that big but somehow still punishingly difficult” hills of the CAL STATE Long Beach campus and a few other bumps along the way.

I didn’t take many photos — it was misty\/hazy\/blechy. Not exactly the postcard moment for Long Beach. No need to write home about this, ya know?<\/p>\r\n

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On top of that, I just had a rough run. I was doing fine through the first half… maybe even until mile 16. And then it just all went sideways, wrong ways, walk ways, cramp ways, you name it ways. Grueling and frustrating and just generally “this is a super dumb hobby I have” mindset.

Not to mention this top 100 saddest moments in a marathon for me. I say top 100 because, let’s be honest, I’ve run a lot of these and with that amount of mileage there are A LOT of sad moments, ya know? But this is definitely top 100. Picture this: it’s mile 23, I’m all the things I’ve laid out above — grouchy, frustrated, crampy, meh-y. And then I see a guy handing out Otter Pops. I ran to him the way I once ran to see Oswald the Lucky Rabbit at California Adventure (my mom still talks about this character sighting that regressed me to an eager 5-year-old on Christmas Eve spotting Santa laying out presents). I was thrilled to get an Otter Pop… and the cherry on top? It was cherry. So, like, top two Otter Pop flavors, right? So I have a bit more pep in my step, I’m running looking forward to sucking down this flavored ice treat, thinking it’ll help cool me off and propel me to the finish line three miles away.

Only the thing is sealed. My hands are too sweaty to gain purchase on the plastic container to rip it open. I can’t wipe them off as my clothes are too soaked from myriad glasses of water doused over my head to cool off. And my teeth may as well be stamped “for pureed food only” as any attempts to bite off the plastic were comically foiled. I was so close; I held the otter pop in my hand and yet it was so far out of reach. There’s a life lesson in there. I think it’s that sometimes life sucks and it just keeps sucking.<\/p>\r\n

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At mile 24 the marathon and half marathon courses merged… and it became a ping-pong, duck and weave, Millennium Falcon flying across an asteroid field fiasco. I already was feeling slowly mc slowerson, walking more than running. But this made it almost impossible to find a runway to, well, run.

Grouch grouch grouch. Moan Moan Moan.

I finished. Whatever. The crowds were overwhelming. This might be my last Long Beach … at least for awhile. I’m sure I’ll forget all about this and I’ll sign up and then sure enough, mile 23, there will be that unobtainable Otter Pop mocking me once more.<\/p>\r\n

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It turns out I and an Otter Pop are my worst enemies. Also the merging of half marathoners and marathoners at mile 24. But I get ahead of myself… The Long Beach Marathon moved up its start time to 5:30 out of high temperature fears. They proved to be unfounded… as did the 5:30 start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43466"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43485,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43466\/revisions\/43485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}