New perspective on running

With the Disneyland half marathon approaching I had the opportunity to try something I hadn't done before. No more long runs before the race, no more crazy intervals, hill workouts, just one photo scavenger fun run with the track club. OK, I did 8 miles on Saturday but that was done with an easy pace as it should have been. Yesterday there was another local event put up by Compete Green (competegreen.com), the Half Marathon of the Harbors and the Ventura Harbor 5K. Brandy and I decided to volunteer and help out by handing waters to the runners. We were assigned the first (and last water station) of the races. It was at mile 1 of the half, near the turnaround of the 5K, and it was at about the mile 12 of the half marathon since it was an out and back course.

I think we were positioned at this station since the powers to be knew we could be trusted to be figure things out. All of the supplies were dropped off at the location, all we had to do was put up the table, lay out the water cups, fill them up with water and position the trash receptacles downstream of us. Brandy was able to lay out 8 rows of 20 cups of the table, and this looked quite impressive until we realized that it was less than a third of the number of runners. We knew that it could be challenging for us but Brandy came up with a plan that if things started getting busy, one of us could pass out the water while the other started laying out more cups and filling them with water. No better plan had ever been hatched up, in my opinion and we executed it perfectly ;)

The perspective of seeing runners in a race as I just stood there was amazing. The different styles of people, regardless of how fast they were, was striking. The winner of the half marathon ran so smoothly and so quiet not only in his motion but in the amount of actual noise as his feet landed. It was quite efficient no matter how you look at his movement. The leading woman was somewhat of a contradiction. Her lower bidy moved the way I expected but she swung her upper body from side to side, but you can't really say anything about it as she was the leading female.

As for the 5K it was easy to note the new 5K runners. Since we were near the turnaround spot for the race we were "only" 1.5 miles from the start. The lead runners didn't even think about taking water but the mid pack runners were happy to see us and gladly took water. I had never been thanked so much for such a small thing, never had I seen such grateful faces for a cup of water. Hopefully I am half as grateful and thankful to the volunteers in the races in which I am entered. It was a great experience and one I would love to have again in the future.