There are so many stories to tell about the Portland marathon, it’s hard to choose just one . . . so I guess I’m going to tell several. Bear with me. Because there was a time when I wondered if this marathon would even
happen at all.
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| There's a pretty view out there somewhere. . . . |
Late last year, when I went looking for a 2017 marathon, I decided that I
wanted to travel, but I didn’t want to leave the country like I had for Berlin. A teammate recommended
the Portland Marathon, so I took a look. At first glance, the course didn’t look too
hilly, and I had friends in Portland who would be fun to visit . . . so I signed up.
Then, as luck would have it, those same friends invited me to their wedding, which was scheduled to happen exactly a
month before the marathon. Perfect, I
thought. I’ll use my long run that
weekend to check out the course. Yet as time passed, the 2016 course remained stubbornly up on the race website, with no sign of being updated. Oh well, I thought, I guess I’ll just follow the old route and hope it doesn't change much.
Then, in June, Runner’s World published an article that made me second-guess my whole plan. It
started with the sentence: “One of the country’s oldest marathons is at risk of
being canceled this year after failing to secure permits from the city of
Portland, Oregon.”
Um, what?
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| Feet are also having some bad luck |
Fortunately, the race organizers did eventually work things out and, one week before the wedding (less than six weeks before the race), the course was published. Whew! Crisis
averted.
Or at least crisis number one. Because when my fiancé and I
arrived the Friday before Labor Day, we found the Pacific Northwest blanketed
by a haze of forest fire smoke. Is it even safe to be running in this? I wondered as I laced up my shoes. What if conditions got worse? However, two weeks later, the fires calmed down, and my Portland friends assured me that rainfall was taking care of the ash in the air. Good. Nothing left to do now except finish the
training cycle.
Or so I thought. A week later, I returned from a long run to find a voicemail
from my sister: “Hi, Allie? Don’t panic, but mom’s in the hospital. Call me
back.” My mother had had a heart attack. Six hundred dollars and twenty-four
hours later, I was in Pittsburgh, watching with relief as they wheeled her out
of surgery, alive and intact. After a day or two, I started looking at my transportation options home . . . a plan that was quickly aborted when I found myself driving my father to the emergency room of a different hospital.
He was also suffering from heart failure.
Thankfully, both of my parents were released from their
respective hospitals within a week, and, thanks to the incredible generosity of
two friends, I flew home to New Jersey feeling shaken but relieved. Surely that
was the final hurdle I’d face before this marathon . . . right?
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| Pre-race pasta dinner (photo and apartment credit: Lisa!) |
Finally, it was the night before my flight to Portland. As I lay in bed trying to will
my eyes shut, I realized that I hadn’t received any alerts about checking in
for my flight. Wow, that could have gone
badly, I thought as I picked up my phone and opened the app. I was about to swipe right to check
in when I did a double-take. Surely that didn't say . . . I couldn’t have. . . . But there it was, glowing right before my very eyes: the flight that had I thought was scheduled for 6:40 pm was actually taking off at 6:40 am—exactly 6 hours from that very moment. And I wasn’t even
packed.
In the end, everything worked out. I not only
made my flight with time to spare, but the plane was so empty that I was able
to move back to the emergency exit row. (Extra leg room!) I stayed with my friends as planned, ate lots of pasta, and showed up at the starting line feeling as
good as I could hope to feel at the end of such an uncertain marathon cycle. But
the Portland Marathon wasn’t done with me yet. Stay tuned for the "irks and
quirks" that awaited me along the course. . . .
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