Could I possibly be warm enough in my Elvis outfit?
This question does not plague me often, but prior to the Memphis Marathon it was paramount. I have always eschewed the wearing of costumes, tutu’s, face paint, or edible underwear in races, but Memphis screamed out for a running Hunka Hunka burning love. With the latest check of the weather, my intuition about shedding the white bejeweled jumpsuit for an Under Armor cold gear ensemble was verified. I donned my black tights and compression shirt as my wife giggled and said I looked like an aging ninja in tennis shoes. Not dissuaded, I self satisfyingly sat on the bed knowing I would be toasty and compact. I would put Elvis on hold until the Las Vegas Marathon later in the year.
I had grown up in Memphis, left after grade school, then returned for medical school. I began running in medical school, largely in response to coffee and an impossible biochemistry course, so I was returning to familiar running turf, so to speak. The medical school is about a mile from the Mississippi River, on which whose bluffs Memphis is perched, so after flunking another biochemistry test I would head out in my Adidas trainers and run to the river (after a particularly bad test even considering jumping in) and back. It was not particularly far, but cathartic none the less. Needless to say the downtown had changed over the past 30 years. No longer did I see the friendly homeless guy I had treated for DTs in the ER hanging out in the downtown park nor did I have to dodge the broken beer bottles and used needles. Now the downtown area was ripe with hipster bars and upscale bistros. They had even built a baseball stadium smack dab in the middle of the city, right across from the hallowed Peabody Hotel. The Peabody ducks now had to compete with quarter beer night and bad organ music. I won’t say I missed the needles, but it did have somewhat of a yuppie feel, for better or worse.
The St.Jude Memphis Marathon has grown over the years and now spawns about 20,000 runners traversing everything from a mile fun run up to the marathon. We were told to self segregate into waves based on our projected pace as to facilitate the start. Let me say asking a marathoner to predict his likely pace throughout the race is like asking Donald Trump to predict which way his hair will lay on any given day. I am as guilty as anyone as I often start a race as a Kenyan and end as a spastic jellyfish. I lined up with my fellow Ethiopian wannabes in wave 5, the 9 minute a mile pace group, and imagined my winged feet carrying me to a new PR, given what I had gleaned from the topography graph of the race course. What I learned is that those dreaded topographers are demon possessed liars whose sole mission in life is to make my quads scream for glycogen like a lawyer screams for billable hours. I mistakenly thought there were only three small hills, going as far as to memorize where they fell in the course, only to find that the map makers (those hounds from Hades) “smoothed out” the graph for “simplicity”. In other words there were a heck of a lot of small rolling hills in between the mountains (okay, I exaggerate). I don’t like hills. I like leprosy more than I like hills. As I get older my major criteria for choosing marathons are which ones have free beer at the end and which ones don’t have the damned hills!
As a young medical student running on the asphalt of downtown Memphis I was immune to much of my environment. Today I took in the various landmarks like Charlie Vargo’s Rendezvous, home of dry rub pig parts (some refer to it as barbecue), sixteen places where Elvis slept (it seems he had trouble finding Graceland at night), Rhodes College (It was Southwestern when I was there but they got all full of themselves and became a Yale wannabe, but it was a pretty campus), and Beale Street, home of the Blues, and black toenails by the time I made it to that point of the race.
Probably the most memorable moment, besides the beer at the finish, was running through the St.Jude Hospital campus. There were patients and employees lining the route making sounds that rivaled the girls of Wellesley at the Boston Marathon, and they were much better looking! Having those folks cheering us was surreal. They are the heroes every day.
The race concluded in the minor league baseball stadium in the middle of the downtown. It was a great finishing spot as it was literally steps from the hotel and a hot shower. I will never forget walking to my first marathon years ago. We were walking with a girl we had just met and she found out it was my first race. She told me that the shower after a marathon was better than sex. It does feel good, but all I can say is that poor girl has had a very disappointing sex life.
