The Royce Files

Interesting running related story came out the other day: 12 Year Old Girl Accidentally Runs Half-Marathon . She came ready to run a 5K but instead ran a the half. Quite an achievement for the youngster and also a scare for her parents.  The organizers of the Rochester (NY) Flower City Challenge certainly enjoyed the the free press this story generated nationwide, but for a race day consisting of a little over 3000 runners they also must be scratching their heads. Starting line and starting time confusion generated the mistake. Perhaps it could have been prevented with better starting line discipline and communication. The half supposedly started 15 minutes prior to the 5K. I can only speculate that there must have been some congestion at the half start which may have impacted the start of the 5K. The 5K appeared to have less entrants- about 1000 for the 5K and little bit over 2000 for the half. I am surprised that the 5K did not have more runners as that has typically been th...

The view near mile 4 just before official race time My preparations for a morning of spectating and random coverage began at 5:30 AM.  My crew zipped over to our race corner near mile 4 at 6:30 AM and set up the easy up tent in a light rain. Not much was happening until we started to see a few runners trickle by. And these were runners with official race bibs. No clue what they were doing. Too far from the Dome to be lost. I think about 2 dozen passed before either half or full officially started. We do know that a guy from Iowa ran the 10K by accident but eventually got on the right course for the marathon. Cris Estes would be proud. Apparently some entrants felt that because of the potential for high humidity in the later morn it would be better to start sooner than later. But perhaps they were slow runners who needed more than 6 hours to complete the course. This is the first time I ever encountered anything like that. Let's go back in time ...

A fews days of recovery from the Fargo Marathon have passed. The blogoshere is beginning to churn out race reports. Not too many as of today. Most of it is crappy news aggregator posts which usually discuss the amount of registered runners which was about 20,000. I saw one post even got the winners totally wrong. Someone must have just put up a post as Fargo Marathon was trending high most of the weekend on Twitter. Here's a few to check out: A guy named Bill from Milwaukee ran the marathon Jordan ran the 1st leg of a the marathon relay- had an elite pace Jenn mentions running the ½ marathon and her daughter running in the 5k Steve ran the ½ marathon in preparation for Grandma’s (the marathon not the person) Overall, the marathon this year was fantastic. Steve in his post above makes the best points about the good vibe of this edition of the marathon. I had the most fun spectating this year. As a volunteer, it felt well organized. The e-mail reminders were good especia...