Pastries and The Iron Man

There’s a coffee and bakery shop in town we favor. The pastries are outstanding, and they serve the best restaurant coffee in the valley, period. This shop is relatively new here, is a bit upscale and is certainly something we very much appreciate having. This morning, however, we found access to the shop restricted by long rows of barriers, all having to do with the internationally popular Iron Man half-triathlon which goes off tomorrow.

Eventually we found a parking spot some blocks away and hiked in. Thankfully their business was running just fine and we found an outdoor table near the street where we could watch the registrants for tomorrow’s race parading by. Irene and I have run a fair amount and did complete one marathon and a few half-marathons, but I don’t remember either of us bringing up the idea of doing a triathlon, which to us simply brought up images of exhausted people in Hawaii crawling up out of the surf, struggling so they could say they had completed the Iron Man. Now, we find, the Iron Man is a just a brand; even this race is called that alhough it’s “only” a half-triathlon, and dozens of families were already heading for the pre-race Iron Man shopping in the specialty tents which, from our vantage point, we could see were set up by the dozens right up the street. So, from being something that only a few could or would do, apparently an almost unlimited number of folks are now somehow finding the time to train to swim, bike and run 70-odd miles to complete a full triathlon.

I guess I admire this. And the energy of the walkers-by seemed terrific even to the point of making me  regret I can’t run any more, what with bad Achilles tendons and replaced knees. I’m not sure I’d want to try completing the swim and the only bike riding I do now is on my electric bike. So the triathlon was a non-starter. But we thought it might be fun to go see the crowds down in the shopping area. So when we finished our coffee and pastries we walked down to check out the tents. We were both aware of how young and fit virtually everyone except us looked. And they were buying stuff that we both thought they should already have, like swimming goggles and shoes. And this in turn reminded me of a little story from the one marathon we did complete in Hawaii.

The Hawaii marathon is not a qualifier, meaning you don’t have to run a specific time to enter it, and anyone can try it. This means that you have all kinds of unique folks showing up, in costumes, on crutches, and even one running the race who passed me while wearing in typical Japanese robes and with wooden shoes. The group that got my attention, however, was the Japanese with their new running shoes. As we were told, it’s considered an excellent thing to have completed a marathon in Japan. However, their races are very restricted. Therefore the closest non-qualifier marathon is the Hawaii marathon, and they fly in in numbers, having possibly never run at all, and the day before line up at the running -shoe stores on the Island and buy their shoes and gear for the next day.

It should go without saying that this is a bad idea. Maybe one of the very last things I would try to do is to run any race in new shoes. It makes my feet hurt just to think about it.  And yet most of these folks who did exactly that, and as near as I could tell, did finish. But they had a process.You would see them, in groups, every few miles, sitting on the curbs, conspicuous in their brand-new shiny shoes, all smoking cigarettes, just taking a little break. By the way, the idea of taking breaks during a marathon is a good one. From my reading I know that there are styles of running where a short break every few miles is built-in and is said to reduce your time overall. But somehow running a marathon in which you take your break every few miles to smoke a cigarette seemed like a strange thing to me at the time. Now, with everything else strange in the world that goes on, it only feels a bit eccentric, but I still smile, thinking back on it and on those folks with their very shiny shoes 

When we were walking through the sea of white running-gear tents after coffee, I noticed that someone had a bunch of small orange cowbells on their table. Cowbells, it turns out, are very popular among spectators at marathons and triathlons. I thought it might be fun for us to have cowbells, just in case we’d go over to see the race tomorrow, so I asked if they were for sale. And, no, they were promotional items, and I was welcomed to take a couple, which I did. Which in turn created an environment where suddenly we wanted to see the race. And, tomorrow Irene and I will walk from home over to the bridge over the highway where the bikers and runners come through, heading downhill into town. We will bring our bells and ring them as folks go riding and running under us.

Our cowbell is sort of the old-person equivalent of a participation medal. I hope the real participants, hearing us, feel good about their accomplishment. Since we are located near the end of the race on what begins the long downhill into town, at the very least they know they will finish and their training is probably over for a while. And I hope they know we’d have been with them, except for the age and infirmity parts, of course.