This past 4th of July I went down to Atlanta to spend the weekend with some of my brothers and sisters. Saturday morning my brother Caleb and I took our little niece and nephew, Lily and Walker, down the street to watch their mommy and daddy (my other brother and sister-in-law) run in the Peachtree Road Race. I was more than happy to stand on the side of the road and watch all the runners go by with my niece and nephew as opposed to being one of the 55,000 running the 10k. I’ve never really been able to get into running, not for any length of time anyways. Even playing soccer all through high school and my freshman year of college (where running is almost all we did) didn’t get me hooked. But anyways, back to the Peachtree. When there’s a 10k road race on the 4th of July and it happens to be the most popular 10k in the world with 55,000 runners, it can get pretty entertaining, even apart from Lily and Walker squirting Aunt Sarah with water til she was soaked.
When you have that many “runners” in a race like this one, you know not everyone “running” is a serious runner. Those guys are up in front and already finished way before the last wave of runners even starts, like our Kenyan winner who finished in 20-something minutes. Guys like him are entertaining because they’re so fast but your entertainment time is limited because they’re so fast. The most entertaining part is everyone else–the people out there just to make a statement or the army guys and firemen running in all their gear or the hundreds of people who lack the originality to dress up as something other than the Statue of Liberty. It was crazy to see the number of little kids running the 10k. I never could have run a 10k when I was that young…ok so I still can’t. But some of these kids were keeping a pretty hardcore pace–it was impressive. I’m a little confused as to why a parent would let their 10 year old daughter run by herself in the biggest 10k in the world, but regardless it was impressive they could keep up. One of my favorite runners was this dude dressed up as Waldo. Of course when everyone on the side of the road watching saw him they shouted, “I found Waldo!!!” It was somewhat comical.
But after mommy and daddy ran by it started to get hot and the kids started to get a little out of control with the squirt gun so we decided to walk back. It was a good experience. Maybe one of these days I’ll conjure up the self discipline to actually run it instead of entertaining myself by watching all the crazy people run by. I doubt that will happen though.
