She is the champion

We've had a busy couple of weeks.

Last week, I started my AT thru-hike; something I've been building toward for over a year.  Three days before we left for Georgia, we returned from California, where temperatures were nice enough for shirt sleeves and everyone wore coats and complained about the bitter cold of 60F weather.  That trip helped schedule my trip; while I was hiking the Shenandoah last fall, The Girl became restless and signed up for a marathon (she heard they had nice bags for this one).  Later, when it came time for me to pick a departure date, I had to work around the schedule she had set, which helped give a more defined structure to my original plan of "some time in March."

We set course for the left coast early enough to give us some time to be touristy and poke around San Francisco (I'll save that for a later post) before the run and Napa Valley (at least one more post) afterward.  The theme for the trip turned out to be Serendipity: we kept doing things on a whim and later finding out that they were the sort of thing most people set out to do intentionally, or local secrets upon which we unwittingly stumbled.

On Sunday morning, I drove us from the hotel, dropped her off at the starting line, and parked the car.  Then I realized I had nothing to do for four and a half hours.  I'm accustomed to that; it was not my first marathon.

At 5:15 that morning, I stood at the end of a dead-end street, a local high school's athletic fields to my right.  The sky was still black and starless, but the Alta Heights mountains to the east were crowned with a thin band of murky pink light.  Far across the field in front of me, a group of coyotes sang to each other, answered by a pair of roosters to the north.  When the coyotes calmed down, I could hear frogs trilling in the shallow stream that led almost to my feet.

When I wandered back to the high finish line area, I saw a group of young volunteers wrestling valiantly but ineffectively with the crowd-control fences they were trying to align.  I watched for a couple minutes before approaching the guy who was clearly in charge and offering my assistance.  He was surprised by the offer, but thrilled to have the help, and I spent the next four hours setting up tents, teaching the fence-wrestlers to set up tents, hanging signs, mending fences, building banners, erecting the large inflatable arch at the finish line, and running other small errands.  I did it on a whim, expecting at most that I'd get to stay near the finish line and get a good picture of The Girl crossing, but by the end of the morning I was a full-fledged staff member, recognized by the people officially in charge of the event and other volunteers who were more officially-sanctioned, but arrived after I did and sometimes looked to me for direction.  At one point I told the harried Finish Line Coordinator (the man I had first approached offering to help) that he needed a few assistant managers.  He laughed, then offered me the job.  "Will you buy my plane ticket?" I asked him.  He gave it enough thought that I half expect to hear from him next year.

I did get to stand at the finish line, right behind an official photographer.  I also received one of the official runner bags (a pretty nice duffel for a morning's work) and a volunteer T-shirt, both far beyond what I had expected.  I just did it to fill the time, but I was glad I did for all that I learned about the running of a marathon on the other side of the finishers' tape.

The Girl, for her part, beat her own PR by over three minutes.  I must have a thing for fast women.  The next afternoon, in another of our random, serendipitous encounters, she was congratulated on her performance by Gary Erickson, the creator of Clif Bar.  That alone was a highlight for both of us (he and his wife also wished me well on my hike.  They're great people.)