Meditations from the Peachtree Road Race

The real race at the Peachtree isn’t logging the 6.2 miles from start to finish. It’s finding the sacred number in the first place.

Not thinking ahead back in March when the entries came out and not qualifying due to laziness and lack of training, my idea to even run the event didn’t occur to me until the week before.

“Do you have a number?”
“No.”
“Don’t’ worry! All you have to do is go to the Expo. People are selling them all over the place.”

That was the advice I got anyway.

So off I went, checkbook in hand. Only to find many others with the same idea. They sat in the couches outside, signs declaring how many numbers they needed. I thought this was supposed to be easy. Geez, I’d scalped tickets at Wrigley Field easier than this. And I wasn’t even trying.

When in doubt, however, always go to the #1 option: telling every friend and foe alike that you need a number. It was either that or show up outside of the Lenox Marta station on race morning, twenty dollar bill stuck inside my sock and fighting off more competition.

Fortunately, a friend came through. “I think,” he said. “Come to our dinner the night before. If Andrea doesn’t show up, the number’s yours.”

So there I sat at Jo's Grill near Blackburn Park. Pasta sizzling on my plate. Praying to God above that every female who walked in wasn’t Andrea. They weren’t. The number was mine.

Now for Step 2 and Step 3 of the proverbial Peachtree Road Race, also hard parts: waking up in the morning, followed by finding a parking place. After all, 55,000 eager Atlantans are supposed to be here so it can’t be too easy.

The waking up part was easy. I never went to sleep in the first place. This could have been a disaster, though Ace Ventura was playing at 4 a.m. so it wasn’t all bad. It’s one of those movies I can always laugh at no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

So I have a number and I’ve woken up and I’ve parked – legally I think – at some up-and-coming subdivision off Wieuca Road. Now for Step 4, also equally as impossible: Meet up with a friend before the race starts.

This sounds easy, but when you’re trying to cross Peachtree Road with all the barricades, this can be tougher than Step 1. But after being routed and re-routed, after turns and U-turns, and after running practically 6.2 pre-race miles, we found our friend.

Finally, it was off to the easy part: the race itself.

The journey down Peachtree was a joy. People running in Scuba gear, people with their hair dyed red, white and blue, flags flying, bands playing, water spraying, fans cheering, some people already drinking despite the early hour. Thank God for my ADD, which let me take most of it in as me and my two friends – starting in the 40,000 block – did the journey.

I will repeat the quote I heard about the new finish at the Peachtree – “It’s a real bitch!” – and I have to say I agree. Turning off of Peachtree somewhere around Mile 6, we began mostly an uphill journey to the finish line. How the Atlanta Track Club successfully pulls this off year after year, particularly when they were told they couldn’t use Piedmont Park, is far beyond me.

But they did it. Again.

For the record, the sacred T-shirt is blue this time, with red, white, and blue coloring inside of the 10K message scrawled across the middle. On the bottom is the date. It’s cotton and it’s dry, therefore it is nice.

Now that we had our reward, it was time for yet another difficult part of the Peachtree: boarding Marta with all those stinky people - like myself. Herding in like cattle, we crowded in our car and headed back to Lenox. Keeping my nose held high and holding my breath, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Wasn’t as hard as getting my number, anyway.

Can’t wait till next year.