ROCK N ROLL USA HALF MARATHON (race report):

I screwed up and didn't get to the start line on time for this race. I mainly just underestimated how big it is and didn't plan to arrive early enough for an event of this size. This was the second year that this was an RnR race. Before that it had been the National Marathon, which I did two years ago. That event was much smaller than this one, and I failed to realize how much bigger it had become. It has now become comparable to the Marine Corps Marathon in size - which is to say, huge. I arrived at 6:30am, an hour before the gun, and promptly got into a huge bathroom line. I got out of the bathroom at 7:15 and still needed to drop off my bag in the bag trucks. Since they were right next to the bathrooms, and the start line was not terribly far away, I figured that I was still fine but would have to do a shorter warm up than planned. But the bag trucks were unbelievably poorly managed. They were organized alphabetically by last name instead of by corral or bib number, and for some reason you couldn't just walk up and hand your bag to somebody. The single volunteer at my truck (and every other one too, as far as I could tell) took a while to make sure that the last name on each person's bag fell into the right alphabetical range. This caused lines to form that were even longer than those at the bathrooms. The bag trucks were school busses parked front-to-back in a long row on the side of the road, and the line for my truck began five busses down the road. I arrived at the back of this line around 7:20, when it became clear that I was going to miss the start by a long shot. It seems that very many people missed the start of their corral for this reason, but I was supposed to be in corral one at the front of the race. Instead I ended up starting with corral seven or eight (I'm not sure). So from the beginning I was surrounded by people running much slower than I wanted to run. Long story less long: I finished in 1:31:16, which is a 6:58/mile pace and at least 30 seconds per mile slower than I had hoped for. Running even that pace took a lot more energy than it normally would have because, when possible, I was weaving through crowds of people from one side of the street to the other, hopping onto and off of curbs and medians, and sometimes running on the wrong side of the road toward oncoming runners when the course doubled back onto itself (which resulted in my 5k split being recorded about a mile earlier than it should have). Sometimes none of those methods of running faster than people around me was possible and I had no choice but to slow down to their pace, so that I was frequently speeding up to much faster than 6:58 pace and slowing down again to a much slower pace. This was worse in the early miles, because the crowds around me were denser then; but I was passing people at roughly the same rate for the entire race. Even though my finishing time was five minutes slower than my PR, which itself was set in a race in which I exploded by halfway and slowed down drastically over the second half, I'm still quite tired afterwards. Part of this is also because I'm not in very good shape right now, though. It is ultimately my fault that I missed the start, but the baggage truck mess was irritating, and it was worse after the race (for half marathoners, at least). When I arrived at my truck after finishing, there were maybe a dozen people in line ahead of me who said they had been standing there for 20-30 minutes, during which time nobody had been given a bag. I don't know what the two people working at the truck (volunteers?) were doing - it seemed like they were looking for those people's bags that whole time and couldn't find them. But after I had been there for another 20-30 minutes, runners started revolting and stormed the truck. The workers kind of retreated and gave up while half a dozen runners took over searching for and distributing bags. (I think similar mutinies occurred in other trucks as well, but I was pretty wrapped up in my own). Inside the truck, bags were somewhat organized by runners' bib numbers: they were more or less in piles by 2,000 digit increments, but within those piles there was no organization, and very many bags were in the wrong piles. Because bib numbers did not correspond to last names, and only bags from people whose last names fell within a certain alphabetical range were in each truck, there really was no way to organize the bags much better than that. Why didn't they assign bags to trucks by bib number instead of by last name? This mess really made me appreciate the mass efficiency and organization of the MCM, which I've done three times without ever waiting more than a minute or two on either end of the baggage check. Today I spent around an hour at the bag truck after the race, and it seems that some others were standing around shivering in sweaty clothes for longer. It's not enough to cause me to foreswear RnR events in the future, but I won't jump at the opportunity to participate in them. I like doing big races sometimes, especially marathons, as long as I get to start up front. But in the future I'll be sure to arrive earlier, and maybe I'll start taking more of an interest in less massive events in general.