Twin Cities Marathon Weekend

Spent the weekend in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and on Sunday, ran the Twin Cities Marathon for the second time. The event has used individual timing "chips" for years, attached to runners shoelaces, but this year they added more tracking stations and had a neat tracking facility available on their web site (implemented nicely as a Java applet), to allow interested observers to track any of the 10,000 runners on the course in real time.

It started with a 5:30 AM bus ride to the starting line, at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Runners are allowed into the concourse area of the dome to escape the chill of the early morning, where we could see the crews transforming the field from the previous night's college football game, Michigan vs. Minnesota, to a baseball field, to get ready for the Twins game later that afternoon. The Twins, by the way, won their game and completed an historic comeback from being 12.5 games out of first on May 27, to outright winning their division.

There were actually two races that day, the marathon and a ten-miler. You could tell the difference between the two camps hanging around in the Metrodome before the race - the ten milers are more jovial, having fun while the marathoners look serious, not many smiles.

The marathon starts at 8 AM in higher-than-usual temperatures. In honor of the CEC 2006 conference which also started on Sunday, I'm wearing my collector's edition STS-2001 hat, you know, the orange one. The scenic course (PDF) winds its way through downtown Minneapolis, through some prominent lake districts south of town, then along both the west and east sides of the Mississippi River, and finally along a seven mile almost straight shot into St. Paul, along historic Summit Avenue. Highlights for me on the run included seeing Minnesota Justice and former NFL great Alan Page playing his tuba on the course around mile 4, getting fanatic crowd support as we moved through the neighborhoods, taking in the great fall scenery, and finally getting a glimpse of the finish line in the distance, at around mile 25.8!

Next day picture of Lake Calhoun, around the six mile mark.

This is a gradual uphill around mile marker 22 in St. Paul, on Summit Avenue, looking east (also taken the day after the event). Summit Avenue is lined almost the entire way with Victorian houses (often quoted as "the best preserved Victorian boulevard in America"), mansions (including the governor's residence), and a few universities.
Finishing time was 4:18 on a seasonably hot day, with the temperatures in the upper-70s at finish time. Eight minutes better than last time - woo! To deal with the usual cooler weather, they always hand out these "space blankets" to all runners immediately after they cross the finish line. We got them again this year, although they weren't needed - the medical crews were kept busy with heat exhaustion problems instead.

No visit to the Twin Cities is complete until you visit the Minneapolis Sculpture Gardens, in the shadows of downtown, where you'll see the famous "cherry and a spoon" sculpture. The cherry itself weighs 1000 pounds and the entire sculpture had to be built at two shipyards (Maine and Rhode Island) because it is so large.



And another stop (not too far from the airport if you have some time to kill) is the historic Minnehaha Falls Park area.

Posted at 09:24PM Oct 02, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport  |