Boston - part II (pre-race)

Okay, so now that I’m on a plane heading for the next adventure, I will finally address Boston.  It’s been on my mind lately because last weekend I had the chance to see a whole bunch of people that I may not have run across in the last month, so the question “How was Boston?” came up several times.  My answer varied in the specifics, but the gist was always the same: it was fine – I’m glad I did it, I think I generally had fun, but I can’t say that I have any burning desire to go back and do it again.  I mean, if a bunch of people were going and wanted to spend a couple days in Boston, I could probably be talked into it, but I won’t be leading that brigade.

In my esteemed opinion, Boston can best be described as two clusterf*cks with a  longass straight run in the middle.  There are no points in the whole ordeal, aside from maybe the expo, that are designed to handle 27,000 people.  None.  This is not to say that the folks running the show don’t do a good job with what they have, but they can only do so much with tiny New England towns and a downtown area that was constructed before the era of big cars (read: the finish area is bounded on all sides by tiny narrow roads).

As noted previously, we escaped much of clusterf*ck A by staying with Shawn’s amazingly generous brother and sister-in-law, who got up and drove us to Hopkington so we could avoid the pre-dawn bus ride from the city and the 3-hour wait in the field/parking lot up the hill from the start. I was particularly pleased with my ensemble: brooks hat, original green horsefly umstead shirt, pink long-sleeved zippy lost and found shirt, black half tights, and awesome rainbow leg warmers created by cutting the feet off awesome rainbow socks from Target.  …and a garbage bag…because it was really windy and we had to part with our warmups quite a while before the race actually started.

Shawn and I located our drop bag buses and made our way down to the start area, hoping to get in a quick pee before taking off.  Predictably, we were not the only ones to have this grand idea, so the portajohn lines were suuuppper long.  Luckily, there was an open lot next to the portajohns, and even more luckily, the masses had organized themselves into a ‘his’ section to the right, and a ‘hers’ section toward the left, so we did our bidness and met back up at the street.  Unfortunately, as I was making my way back to the road, I ran across someone who had missed the his vs. hers memo and a got an eyeful of the ‘shaking out’ part of the procedure.  So now I have that in my arsenal of experiences.