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Madison Mini Marathon
Aug. 19th, 2012 06:42 pmI ran in the Rock 'n Sole half marathon this year in Milwaukee, and the organizers of that event also do the Madison Mini-Marathon and had a M2 Challenge "Rockin to the Capitol" thing with an extra finisher medal for people who ran both races. It sounded like fun.
I'm not a highly experienced racer, but I can say that these guys can organize the crap out of an event, at least compared to certain other event organizers. These were smoothly functioning events.
This was my first race away from home. Madison is only an hour and a half or so of car driving away, but far enough away for me to spend a night in a hotel, certainly so given that packet pickup was the day before. This was one of the "official" hotels and they were prepared for a bunch of crazy people planning to get up at four in the morning on Saturday.
Madison may be a smallish city but it is also a college town, and obviously it's basically not a place you can drive around and park a car in easily. It's worse because the city center is squeezed between a bunch of lakes and so unlike the usual Midwestern big-flat-region where you can just lay out a grid of streets intersecting at right angles they have a weird square crossed by diagonals, with every street one-way and every intersection a weird mix of mandatory or prohibited turns with some random number of streets intersecting. Really, I'm there to run 21.1km at maximum speed, just parking the damn car a few km away and walking would be perfectly fine, but unlike my own home city I have no idea where to go about doing that or how to get there. (In Milwaukee I pretty much have my own personal downtown parking spot in a location that I think is quite convenient but which for some reason no one else seems to want to park in.) I drove round and round and round again Friday night trying to figure out where I might be able to park a car in the vicinity of the packet pickup location. Race morning was easier since I just stuck the car in the first parking garage I came upon on the way toward the start, which was plenty close enough. Also, these days I have the benefit of the Google navigation app in the phone, which helps tons in a maze of one-way-left-turn-only streets.
Race morning! What can be better that waking up at 04:40 on a weekend? The hotel, being ready for the event, had their breakfast rolls and coffee and whatnot ready at 4:30 but I brought my own breakfast of familiar items. It's best not to try interesting new foods before a 21km run, really. Once you get within a few blocks of the start of an event with five thousand participants, it's pretty easy to tell that you've found the right place. All those hundreds of people with numbers pinned to their shirts is a pretty good clue. They had loudspeakers set up, an announcer announcing, music playing, and I'm sure the people living on each side of the starting line were thrilled about that at six AM. It was a cool morning with clear skies and minimal wind. The start was at 7:00. It's a pretty course, which went past the capitol building, past lakes, and through the arboretum. Every one of the numerous aid stations had rows of tables with mobs of volunteers cheerfully handing out cups of water or Gatorade from their massive supply of ready-to-hand-out pre-filled paper cups. Did I mention this event was organized?
I run with a Garmin GPS (Runners: You will recognize them by their giant GPS-heart-rate-wristwatches. You can see my data from the race on Garmin Connect here), but there were also pace groups running, holding up signs with their target time and wearing even-more-brightly-colored-shirts than most of the rest of us. I caught up with the 1:45 target time group pretty quickly and ran with them for a while, then got ahead of them. I finished in 1:44:06, which is 2:10 faster than my previous best time, set at the indoor half-marathon this January at the Pettit Center. That's just over 12.1 km/hr, just a hair faster than 5 minute kilometers or 8 minute miles.
At the finish they had a highly organized process to hand you water, a washcloth with a sponsor's logo on it, granola bars, cookies, and, of course, the finisher's medal. Then head for the beer table for your free beer. As I always say, normally, if you are drinking beer before 9AM, that might be a warning sign that you have issues, assuming you aren't working some sort of night shift. Here, we'd already been up for four or five hours and had run 21.1km, so, really, good time for a beer.
The timing crew has progressed beyond the old-style eventual taping-up of printouts of times, and now you go to the time tent and they type in your number and print out your time and the intermediate splits (5 miles, 10 miles, and time for the last 5km, in this case) for you. Next to them those of us in the M2 Challenge got checked off the list and given the medal for that. Highly organized.
Overall, it's a fun event and I recommend it, as well as the Milwaukee Rock 'n Sole now that it's organized by this highly organized crew.
Oh, and how do we know that we're in Wisconsin? That finisher's medal also can be used as a bottle opener. Around here, we need to be able to get our beer bottles open. It's actually a pretty good bottle opener: Photo here.
I'm not a highly experienced racer, but I can say that these guys can organize the crap out of an event, at least compared to certain other event organizers. These were smoothly functioning events.
This was my first race away from home. Madison is only an hour and a half or so of car driving away, but far enough away for me to spend a night in a hotel, certainly so given that packet pickup was the day before. This was one of the "official" hotels and they were prepared for a bunch of crazy people planning to get up at four in the morning on Saturday.
Madison may be a smallish city but it is also a college town, and obviously it's basically not a place you can drive around and park a car in easily. It's worse because the city center is squeezed between a bunch of lakes and so unlike the usual Midwestern big-flat-region where you can just lay out a grid of streets intersecting at right angles they have a weird square crossed by diagonals, with every street one-way and every intersection a weird mix of mandatory or prohibited turns with some random number of streets intersecting. Really, I'm there to run 21.1km at maximum speed, just parking the damn car a few km away and walking would be perfectly fine, but unlike my own home city I have no idea where to go about doing that or how to get there. (In Milwaukee I pretty much have my own personal downtown parking spot in a location that I think is quite convenient but which for some reason no one else seems to want to park in.) I drove round and round and round again Friday night trying to figure out where I might be able to park a car in the vicinity of the packet pickup location. Race morning was easier since I just stuck the car in the first parking garage I came upon on the way toward the start, which was plenty close enough. Also, these days I have the benefit of the Google navigation app in the phone, which helps tons in a maze of one-way-left-turn-only streets.
Race morning! What can be better that waking up at 04:40 on a weekend? The hotel, being ready for the event, had their breakfast rolls and coffee and whatnot ready at 4:30 but I brought my own breakfast of familiar items. It's best not to try interesting new foods before a 21km run, really. Once you get within a few blocks of the start of an event with five thousand participants, it's pretty easy to tell that you've found the right place. All those hundreds of people with numbers pinned to their shirts is a pretty good clue. They had loudspeakers set up, an announcer announcing, music playing, and I'm sure the people living on each side of the starting line were thrilled about that at six AM. It was a cool morning with clear skies and minimal wind. The start was at 7:00. It's a pretty course, which went past the capitol building, past lakes, and through the arboretum. Every one of the numerous aid stations had rows of tables with mobs of volunteers cheerfully handing out cups of water or Gatorade from their massive supply of ready-to-hand-out pre-filled paper cups. Did I mention this event was organized?
I run with a Garmin GPS (Runners: You will recognize them by their giant GPS-heart-rate-wristwatches. You can see my data from the race on Garmin Connect here), but there were also pace groups running, holding up signs with their target time and wearing even-more-brightly-colored-shirts than most of the rest of us. I caught up with the 1:45 target time group pretty quickly and ran with them for a while, then got ahead of them. I finished in 1:44:06, which is 2:10 faster than my previous best time, set at the indoor half-marathon this January at the Pettit Center. That's just over 12.1 km/hr, just a hair faster than 5 minute kilometers or 8 minute miles.
At the finish they had a highly organized process to hand you water, a washcloth with a sponsor's logo on it, granola bars, cookies, and, of course, the finisher's medal. Then head for the beer table for your free beer. As I always say, normally, if you are drinking beer before 9AM, that might be a warning sign that you have issues, assuming you aren't working some sort of night shift. Here, we'd already been up for four or five hours and had run 21.1km, so, really, good time for a beer.
The timing crew has progressed beyond the old-style eventual taping-up of printouts of times, and now you go to the time tent and they type in your number and print out your time and the intermediate splits (5 miles, 10 miles, and time for the last 5km, in this case) for you. Next to them those of us in the M2 Challenge got checked off the list and given the medal for that. Highly organized.
Overall, it's a fun event and I recommend it, as well as the Milwaukee Rock 'n Sole now that it's organized by this highly organized crew.
Oh, and how do we know that we're in Wisconsin? That finisher's medal also can be used as a bottle opener. Around here, we need to be able to get our beer bottles open. It's actually a pretty good bottle opener: Photo here.
