L.A. MARATHON

The L.A. Marathon has been a love/hate deal for me. This relationship has been going on for a year now. I am not quitting on the 26.2 miles through the City of Angels but I am just weighing my options at this point. Our relationship is struggling right now.
Here’s the timeline of our relationship:

* About this time last year I was thinking of making the L.A. Marathon my first go around at 26.2 miles. However, I was offered a coaching position at Saint Mary’s and decided to pursue that instead of the L.A. Marathon. Looking back on it, that was the right decision to make and having the Bayshore Marathon as my first experience is perfectly fine with me.

* So I move to L.A. and the 2009 marathon is scheduled for March 1. No problem. The training schedule is put into some early motion.

* The marathon is moved up two weeks to Feb. 16. OK, not a great thing but the training schedule I am on for the Pasadena half-marathon actually fits quite nicely into training for a full marathon on Presidents Day. Not thrilled about it but it’s workable.

* Then on Tuesday morning I see this headline in the L.A. Times – “L.A. Marathon changes race date again - to Memorial Day” … Umm, are you kidding me? By no mean do I consider myself a running expert but Memorial Day in L.A. is hot and humid. Marathons are run in the cool of the morning in the low 50’s or 60’s. Anything more than that and you have a recipe for bad things. The response of this move is pretty much outrage in the L.A. running community.

The thing with running the L.A. Marathon is that it already isn’t a spectacular big city marathon. It really falls short of what Chicago, New York and Boston do. In fact, it’s not even close. After thinking about my relationships with the L.A. Marathon I have broke off our casual relationship till another time so I can see others. My focus now is on the Big Sur Marathon in April. Doesn’t this picture make you want to run? (Go to the website, you'd want to run this thing too!)

So to the L.A. Marathon it really is your fault. I wanted to make this relationship work as quickly as possible but you made things very difficult. However, I’d like to remain casual friends until we complete our relationship at the finish line.