KRAC Blog

Every year I look at the Boilermaker pix and marvel at the fact that this is as good-looking as I am ever going to get, because next year will be worse.

Wendy and Coleen do not have this problem.

By the way, 11,074 finishers this year.

I could cruise to a late October 13.1 if I can stick to this....

I had a great Boilermaker weekend, with a radically re-engineered group this year. The usual KRAC stalwarts were unavailable, but Wendy and Coleen proved to be amiable companions. Coleen located the best hotel I've stayed at for this event.  (Hard to believe I've run a dozen of them, but I have the glassware to prove it.) It was bigger than ever this year, and every year I marvel at the oddness of it. For one weekend this worn out old city is filled with athletes. When we went to the supermarket after dinner to buy breakfast stuff and Gatorade the bottled water aisle was cleaned out-- the stocker told me that this was the third time he'd reshelved that day. At Dominique's Chesterfield, which has added a room, there was a long table next to ours that gradually filled up with the members of the Belle Watling Track Club, the only team in the region with a name to rival ours. (I had the hats, and we split an order of the greens Moreli.)

No llama. At the zoo here was a tortoise, which is amusing, and a big caiman, but the Utica Zoo really has to get with the program and bring on the large charismatic mega-fauna. On the other hand, the orange popsicle was perfect, the most refreshing thing I will eat all summer. The race, you say? Yeah, that was good too. I was under-trained, and although It seemed like it was going to be a cool morning by the end of the first mile the cloud cover had cleared and I knew I was going to struggle. I reckoned the best strategy would be to take water every stop, and for a while that worked, but at the top of the six mile hill, before Utica College, I determined that I was in sufficent gastrointestinal distress to warrant an extended rest stop. I will spare further detail, but it cost me on time, although I was able to soldier on successfully thereafter. This year's flyover was sort of lame-- we got a big helicopter instead of jets. I'm not crazy about jet flyovers as a general proposition-- they seem more than slightly totalitarian I think-- but there is an undeniable cool factor with jets that choppers don't deliver.