Tucson Marathon 2009

Originally posted: December 27 at 5:38pm

Running up in Scottsdale this weekend brought back memories that I’ve surely blocked out for good reasons. However, once again, I feel the need to document these events for either my future Presidential Memoirs or what will undoubtedly become Exhibit H in some future trial. Here are some random thoughts before I suppress them once again:

- If the Chicago and Tucson Marathons were people, the Chicago Marathon would be George Clooney while the Tucson Marathon would be the mongoloid cousin that lives out back in your Uncle’s shed. You know, the one that everyone knows about but no one wants to make contact with. Don’t pretend like you don’t know.

- The “expo” was lame. It started at noon. Since this is Tucson, that meant that all of the workers showed up sometime around 12:30pm. I felt bad for the volunteers so I helped explain the chip system to a few new runners and even got to stuff bags with the parents of ultra-marathon great Pam Reed.

- I signed up to be on a relay team that consisted of two young ladies and two old guys. We thought we were being nice to let the girls run the first two legs of the race because it was a shorter distance. It turns out that the “Flat, Boston Qualifying Tucson Marathon” is actually an extremely hilly and rugged race for the first ten miles. Oops. Heh heh heh…

- The girls carpooled to their relay locations while I chose to take the shuttle bus to my spot. When I got to the spot to drop off my car I noticed that there were no busses and three girls standing on a street corner. These were not the typical ladies that stand on any given street corner in Tucson; they seemed to have all of their teeth and most of their hair.

- A bus pulls up around five minutes before we were supposed to leave. The driver said that he didn’t know that he was supposed to take us and he also didn’t know where he was taking us. None of us were surprised.

- The four of us got on the bus and sat towards the middle. The three young ladies were smartasses and a bit on the vulgar side when it came to talking about anything. I felt at home.

- Right before we leave a lady gets on the bus and sits right in front me. She immediately gets on her cell phone and decides to talk to anyone that would answer. There were 50 other empty seats on the bus and she has to sit in front of me. I am not an overly religious person but I will admit that I prayed that God would smite her. I figured it was going to be a long bus ride and He owes me one.

- It needs to be mentioned that the Tucson marathon doesn’t actually take place in Tucson. It starts up in a small town called Oracle. This town reminds me of that one movie with the hillbillies that try to make that guy squeal like a pig before sodomizing him…I think it was called “High School Musical 3”…or something like that.

- We stopped at the wrong place and nobody knew where we were supposed to go. I decided to run up a mile or so to see if I could get some answers. That was stupid. Luckily the girls on the bus made the driver come get me and we eventually got to the correct relay hand off point.

- I made sure to let the young ladies know that one of my teammates bedazzled our relay baton and that it wasn’t weird for a guy to run with a shiny stick.

- Our first runner arrived before I left and almost got ran over by a car.

- I took off too fast in order to show my new friends my spirit stick…note to self, wait until after the race to show the girls your spirit stick…

- Instead of the 9:04 pace I was shooting for, I ran the 8.4 miles at an 8:27 pace. I should also mention that at this time I did not have my billion-dollar shoe inserts and was instead running on two little pieces of foam taped into my shoe.

- I was able to pass the 4:30 and 4:15 pace groups and I am very happy to report that they weren’t douche bags like the Nike pace team in Chicago.

- After my race I must have been delirious because I actually took a cup of Xood. Xood is the official pretend Gatorade drink of the Tucson Marathon and is made right here in one of Tucson’s many meth labs. Xood tastes like monkey piss mixed with chalk that has then been strained through a dirty sock. It is probably the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth…and I went to college in Indiana so that’s saying a lot!

- Our 1st relay runner drove us to the finish so we could meet up with our final runner, get our medal and see what food they had. On the way we were almost killed twice.

- The first time was when we were coming up to a light. There was a police officer in the middle of the road that was signaling for us to stop. I guess we weren’t slowing down fast enough because he started flailing his pharmaceutically enhanced arms like one of those wacky inflatable arms guys that they use to entice you to come in and buy a cell phone. The car next to us decided to stop right next to the officer in the middle of the road. The officer, already experiencing roid rage, started screaming at the car and acted like he was going to punch out their window. I peed myself a little and then we left.

- A few blocks later it was time to turn left off of the main strip. I guess we weren’t going fast enough because the truck behind us started honking incessantly. Our driver decided to teach them a lesson by slowing down to around 4 miles an hour. I may have given the truck driver the one-fingered salute a few times but to be honest that’s just the way we say hello back home. The truck drove around us and slammed on its breaks. An old man gets out of the truck, gets a piece of wood out of the truck bed, shakes it at us, gets back in his truck and places the piece of wood in the passenger seat. I peed myself a little and then we left.

- We finally get to the finish line and most importantly the food. They had Nutella on a tortilla. It was awesome!