In search of North Dakota (day 4)

Saturday, May 17, 2008
North Dakota

Race day. We were up early, ate a quick breakfast, and like pretty much everyone else in town, it seemed, we were off to the Fargodome, where the marathon was to begin. Traffic was slow, but we arrived and parked a half hour before race time.

The race began at eight o'clock. It was the first marathon I've been to that began with the singing of "O Canada" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the saying of a prayer. Anna was among the thousands of runners in the race, Peter on his bicycle, and I on the spectator shuttle bus. It was a gorgeous day. There was no or little wind at first, but it picked up midway through the race.

The shuttle bus was not at all what it was cracked up to be. There were no signs as to where it was supposed to stop, so I asked where to find it and was told it would stop on the west side of the Fargodome. No one else was there, and after waiting for a period of time, I circled back around the Fargodome and was told the bus stopped on the south side. Even though it was scheduled to come every fifteen minutes, I waited with a handful of other people for nearly forty-five minutes before it actually showed up. By then I calculated that Anna would already have passed mile seven, the first of two stops the shuttle was scheduled to make, so I and several others stayed on and went to the second stop at mile twenty-one. The bus driver did not seem to know for sure where he was supposed to be going and let us off many blocks from where the runners would pass by.

About four of us—a lady from central Illinois, a lady from somewhere in Minnesota, a young black kid, and I—had really bonded by now, as we made our way to the race site, leaving us feeling like we should exchange Christmas cards or something. Our spectator site was in a beautiful spot—a golf course on one side, the Red River on the other. Anna finally ran by, I displayed one of my signs, and actually ran beside her for a dozen yards or so.

I then walked back to where the shuttle bus had said it would return. The friendly black kid said he'd been waiting there for forty-five minutes and nothing had come. I concluded that if I wanted to see Anna cross the finish line, I'd better walk back the nearly two miles to the Fargodome. I did, and she finished shortly thereafter.

Most of the race course was in Fargo, but a portion of it was in Moorehead, so Anna actually ran in both North Dakota and Minnesota.

Anna's time was four hours and sixteen minutes, not as fast as she had wanted, so she could qualify for Boston, but respectable nonetheless. Her ankle, which had been causing her such grief the past couple months, did not bother her at all. She was 168th out of 504 women in the marathon, 666th out of all 1,440 people who finished, and second out of four people here from Utah. Peter thought we should have carpooled or something.

This was Anna's eighth marathon. She has now run in five states: Alaska, California, Utah, Idaho, and now North Dakota.