Published by the DAILY RECORD of Morris
County, New Jersey
On Sunday, July 21, 2013
Copyright, Madeline Bost, 2013
Maybe another record was broken and that being the high
temperature that cause the organizers to post a notice on the race website on
Thursday afternoon that the event would not be timed and would be shortened by
nearly a mile due to the extreme heat. Some
people may have opted to stay in a nice air conditioned space but from the look
of Headquarters Plaza Speedwell Avenue a lot of people were ready to go, racing
or not, hot as heck or not.
The Morris County Striders [full disclosure: my running
club] provides course marshals for the event and they were able to double up on
positions due to the missing mile. That
may have been a good thing because the marshals who were in the “floater”
position, Roger Price of Randolph, Ed Neighbour of Sparta and Joe Treimel of Pequannock
and Bernie McKay of Morristown were
there to react to any situation and remedy it.
Their roles had called for strong voices and an instinct to react
quickly to a situation. They had no inkling
that they would soon be put to the test.
With those four or five thousand runners and walkers
starting out to travel just two miles there was bound to be some problems. The faster runners fairly leaped off the
starting line when the horn sounded on Speedwell, but those further back barely
moved for several minutes before they were clear to run or walk.
The course is
basically an out and back and the last three quarter mile or so was still
filled with people who had barely begun to move off Speedwell Avenue to the
first turn onto Early Street when the faster runners had hit the turn-around
and were on their way back.
Ooops! Those
back-of-the-pack folks had filled Early Street from sidewalk to sidewalk and
now the police vehicle leading the returning speedsters would soon be turning
onto Early and heading right into the crowd.
“I said to Bernie,” Price recalls. “Oh my God, look up there! We’ve got to get them off the street.”
It’s not easy convincing people that they must clear a road
for what appears to be no good reason.
Most of the runners had probably never looked at the course map and did
not know that theirs was only one side of the road.
Shouting, the four men desperately began to herd the
unwitting runners back to their rightful place on their half of Early Street.
They were mostly successful but when the lead police vehicle
turned up Early Street there were still some people on the wrong side of the
road. Siren screaming, horn sounding,
lights flashing the police car was using its full arsenal of sound and sight as
people scurried either to the sidewalk or back to the other side of the street.
Just in time as Tradelle Ward of Hoboken was in full stride
to be the first runner to finish. If you
want to say you had a run of bad luck it would have to top Ward’s. Last year the runner from Stryker was delayed
in traffic and didn’t make it to the start.
This year Ward, a former miler, was primed for action and although he
was the first man to cross the finish line it was an empty victory. No time recorded and no award given.
Meanwhile, out on the course those less fit and much slower
were feeling the heat. If Ward and the
other leaders of the pack finished in ten or eleven minutes and were tossing
down gulps of water at the finish, out on Sussex Avenue at the turn- around,
folks may have been on the run for twenty minutes or more.
Course marshal Marty Rosenberg of Wharton was at the
beginning of the large loop that turned the runners back to head to the
finish. Rosenberg said that many of the
slower people were looking pretty ragged.
He appointed himself the unofficial “monitor” and began to tell people
to just turn back at that point and not make the loop that might have added
another quarter mile of agony.
Rosenberg said that some refused to give in to the heat and their
pain and completed the full course, but others gratefully followed his
direction and did a one eighty and headed for “home”. When a race isn’t a race there is no shame in
cutting the course.
Back at Headquarters Plaza none appeared to be suffering
from doing the two mile race and there were many happy faces around. Competitive runners had not found the heat to
be daunting thanks to the abbreviated course and not feeling the need for speed
the less fit were happy too. A smiling couple
with their two children, all dressed in similar attire asked a stranger to take
their picture for posterity. Their happy
grins said it all. Race or not, hot or
not, it was a fun event.
##
A calendar of USATF sanctioned events can be found at www.usatfnj.org or at www.raceforum.com for running and tri and
biathlon events.
Contact Madeline Bost at madelinebost@verizon.net.
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