|
Ed's Sk8toronto Website
LONG BEACH MARATHON (CALIFORNIA) -OCT 2005 The race went well for me –but not utterly fantastic. As we waited for the start of the race they announced that the Master Men (over 35) would go out 2 minutes after the open pros. This was great because it meant that I didn’t have to sort myself into a pack a half a mile into the race. My job now was simply to stay with the lead pack. Despite the fact that we were all over 35 yrs old the pace seemed really fast at the beginning. I was having a bit of trouble keeping up but I was managing. It was not long before my buddies Robert Clair and Bob Harwell dropped off the back. I always seemed to be at the back of the pack with the other struggling skaters and a few times I covered short gaps when the guy in front couldn’t manage it. Sometimes I pulled guys back up. Other times they didn’t make it. We negotiated the concrete pathway along the beach and got back to the streets before the bicycles became much of a problem. Around this time I figured that I would be able to stick with the pack –with luck and hard work. Throughout the race there were a lot of changes in pace. This is hard to deal with when you are "on the brink" of being dropped. The course was pretty much as I remembered it –a lot of turns and some pretty rough pavement. In one twisty section through some residential streets I realized that I could pick up a few positions on the corners and I had some fun doing this. I always seemed to end up back near the end of the line however. I stopped my watch at all the mile signs that I noticed. We did the first 5 miles at a bit better than 3 minutes per mile and then did a 3 mile stretch (mostly along the beach) in only 8 minutes. This is where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. At this point we were more than a minute under a 3 minute per mile pace –but we lost it all by the time we came past the 14 mile mark and dropped another minute before we got to mile 19. After that, we pretty well stayed at 3 minutes per mile until things got fast at the very end. At one point, the route went onto a bike path from a road –turning at the same time. Greg Major went down perhaps 30 feet in front of me. He was just off the path and it looked like he was going to jump back on right in front of me. There was nothing I could do to change my line as I was having enough trouble holding the corner. Well, he did jump in front of me and I clobbered into him pushing him back down again. I stayed up and he managed to get back into things in short order (so no harm was done). As well, there were a couple of incidents with cyclists going down –probably due the close proximity of the much faster moving skaters. In both cases the skaters were unscathed -but probably not the cyclists. I didn’t have the legs for a sprint at the finish. I just didn’t have my best stuff happening. I finished near the tail end of the lead pack –but 20 seconds back from the leaders. My time was 1:19:04. I think I did well for a 53 year old but there were a few my age that did better. I don’t know how many more years I will be able to stick with this lot in this race. Perhaps I will find out or perhaps they will cancel the skating part of the race. They almost cancelled it this year and I am sure there will be more talk about it again. There were not a whole lot of skaters in the event really. Later: There has been some internet chat about all the bikes on the course and what a disaster it causes. Apparently there was another cyclist that went down near the finish of the Pro Men’s race –so that makes at least 3 bikers that went down due to the skaters. And it is the skaters that are complaining! As well, the top 4 Master Men finishers were apparently led to the wrong finish line (the cycling one) by the motorcyclist that was leading them in. I knew that several of our group went the wrong way –but I didn’t know the reason. My prediction is that all the complaints that will come will kill the Long Beach Marathon as a skating venue. It will be the same fate that the skating section of the Niagara Marathon suffered a few years ago. Skaters just move too fast to be accommodated by organizers who are more attuned to running speed. The pictuce below was taken by Glenn Koshi during the race. I am not sure at what point in the race it was taken.
|
