Skip to main content

Marathon Madness

(Yes, I technically only ran a half-marathon, but I like the alliteration, so I left it off)

This weekend was my half-marathon down in San Jose, and it led to all sorts of hi jinx. I actually had to drive down to San Jose twice, once to pick up my race packet, and once to actually run the race. They put on an expo from 9AM to 5PM on Saturday, and I was supposed to pick up my packet between those hours. Yes, you read that correctly: "supposed to."

I planned on picking up my packet sometime mid-morning, then driving to Mountain View to meet up with my friend for lunch. The first wrinkle to my plan was that I had some family obligations to deal with that morning. I didn't finish up with that until about 12:30PM, so I decided to switch up the plan. Instead, I drove to Mountain View first, and I'd pick up my packet after that. It's about a 30 minute drive to the convention center from Mountain View, so I figured I still had plenty of time to make it work.

Lunch was good, and I was glad to catch up with my friend. In fact, lunch was so good, we decided to extend the outing by grabbing dessert. By this point, it was 3:15PM, but that gave me 45 minutes to get dessert and make it back to my car. Plenty of time. However, we drove to Palo Alto, and we hit a ton of traffic. The UCLA-Stanford game was that afternoon, and we caught all of the people leaving the stadium. What's worse, they had blocked off city streets to account for the large number of pedestrians. This lady on a walker actually beat our car to the end of the block (though in our defense, she was deceivingly quick).

Anyhow, I didn't get back to my car until 4:15PM, so I had to rush to get to the convention center. Of course, given the way the afternoon was turning out, I hit traffic on the way there. Translation: I pulled up to the convention center at 4:55PM. It took me 10 minutes to park and run up to the exhibition hall, which meant that it was now past 5PM, and I did not yet have my packet in hand.

I asked around to see if there was any way I could still pick up my packet, and the first guy said something to the effect of, "5PM means 5PM sharp." Obviously, I was not a fan of that guy. The next guy, however, was much more helpful, and got on his walkie-talkie. Eventually, he figured out that some of the volunteers were still helping the "stragglers," so I took off running towards the kind volunteers. They were actually taking down their various posts, so no one knew where anything was anymore. As a result, I got more exercise than I expected, but I eventually found the right booth and got my packet.

Because I was so late, I didn't get a t-shirt. I also didn't get a wristband for my free post-run beer (a decision I would regret later). However, I had my race packet. It had taken a little bit of extra exercise, slightly elevated blood pressure, and some embarrassment, but I had my packet. I breathed a sigh of relief at that point. All that was left now was to actually run the race.

Incidentally, if you're looking for a moral to this story, I'd suggest that you should always keep track of sporting event schedules. Even if you absolutely hate sports, it'll be good to know when traffic might be a problem. And if you do hate sports, you're borderline lame, so keeping up with who's playing could net you some cool points.
Labels:

Comments

  1. StellaOctober 4, 2009 at 10:34 PM

    So I'm assuming that nothing amusing happened during the race since this post ends before the actual marathon. I'm suspicious...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sam ChangOctober 5, 2009 at 7:31 AM

    Well, *somebody* (two somebodies, actually) said my posts were too long, so I was going to put up a second one later. I was actually going to try to do it last night, but I got tired & went to bed instead.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more