Pasadena Marathon Inaugural Redux

Last weekend I ran the Second First Pasadena Marathon.

Some of you may know or remember that I had been training for the Inaugural Pasadena Marathon to be run last November. It was to be my 2008 marathon but that plan ended up in smoke (literally-- they canceled the race due to wildfires). I was dead-set on running a Pasadena Marathon so I was one of the first to sign-up when they rescheduled the Second First Pasadena Marathon (a.k.a. Inaugural Redux) for last weekend.

In the week leading up to the marathon, the forecasters had predicted temperatures in the 60's and possible scattered showers on marathon day. By the Thursday before the race the forecast was for a 70% chance of showers with potential thunderstorms.

It started to sprinkle while we were lining up at the race start. It was light misty rain that is typical of Seattle-- the kind that actually makes for fun running. But as the race start time got closer and closer, the rain started to get heavier and heavier, and I was getting wetter and wetter. At 6:30a.m. the race officially started and the skies opened up and dumped water everywhere.

After about 20 minutes, the rain stopped and we all started to enjoy the race. People started to discard their improvised raingear (garbage bags and plastic ponchos) as we ran past Cal Tech. I picked up one of these plastic ponchos off the sidewalk because it was still early. I'm sooooo glad that I did this. At about mile 5 the sky started to dump water again and the gutters in the streets started to flood. The plastic poncho didn't really keep me dry, it just made it harder to get completely soaked. I thank whomever threw it away and hope they didn't regret throwing it away too much.

It continued to rain heavily off-and-on until about mile 15. I saw people huddling under the bathroom structures at the Rose Bowl just to get a break from the rain and wind. About that time (mile 14), a Japanese man looked me in the eyes and said, "This is miserable." The funny thing is, I didn't feel miserable until he said that. Then I thought, "yeah, this IS miserable and I am only half-way done." I was cold, wet, hungry, and tired. Then a few miles later, as I pushed myself uphill, my left calf started to cramp. So I walked. Every now and then I would try to run, but then I would cramp even worse somewhere else. So I walked some more. By the end, I started to cramp in my upper back so I could barely move my arms without cramping. But I kept walking. And I finally walked across the finish line and received my medal.



In retrospect, it wasn't that bad of a race. I now know what it is like to run a marathon in the rain and will be better prepared next time. Plus the scenery is gorgeous and the non-ideal conditions created a sense of unity of spirit based on common suffering.

Since this was Pasadena's first marathon, I expect the race organizers will work out some of the kinks by next year. It was suggested that I write the following section in case somebody involved with the marathon wants to know things that should be improved. It would be nice if in next years race they would do the following: 1)Tell the police officers NOT to stop the runners to let traffic through. Nothing makes runners more angry than messing with their race times because they have to stop for traffic during a race. 2) Tell the volunteers there IS a difference between water and sports drink. It is not nice to be told they are being given water only to be given icky tasting sports drink by a surly teenager. 3)Get more portable restrooms and put them throughout the course! Luckily there are a lot of bushes around the Rose Bowl, but come on! I had to wait until the Rose Bowl for a bush because there weren't enough restrooms. And I'm a girl! 4) Tell the volunteers NOT to make disparaging remarks about how bad the runners look or how slow they are. I heard several comments about this throughout the course. And I easily made the time cut-off. I can't imagine what it was like for the people behind me. 5) Make sure all the bike riders are past the startline before you start the runners. Really. It's just common sense.

All in all, I'm glad that I did the race. But I'm not sure they will get a lot of repeat business. I heard a lot of complaints during and after the race. It is going to take a couple of months and a little bit of marathon amnesia before a lot of people sign up for this race again.

Celebrity ghosts?

Last weekend I attended a dinner party with some people who had worked the front desk at several celebrity hotels in NY and LA in the late '80s/ early '90s. The conversation got really interesting when they described their experiences at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

Chateau Marmont was and is a favorite place for celebrities to stay while in Los Angeles. It sounded like the people working there almost had a bed-and-breakfast relationship with the guests in the early 90's-- the guests knew the service people by name, they had conversations over lunch, and the service people helped the guests like they were family.

There were LOTS of stories of drug abuse, wild behavior, celebrity secrets, and who's nice/who's a jerk. Most of them are things that probably shouldn't be written about by me in this blog because they aren't my secrets or stories to tell. However, there were a couple of stories that were fascinating and (I'm pretty sure) won't get me sued for slander-- they are the ghost stories at the Chateau Marmont.

Several people have died in the hotel (including John Belushi), and several of the rooms are reportedly haunted.

One guest (she was a well known celebrity, maybe RuPaul (correction from previously Angela Bassett)?) came down to the desk one morning and asked if the maids cleaned up in the middle of the night. The desk clerk told her that the housekeeping staff hadn't shown up for the day yet. She then said that she had come back late the previous evening and taken off her clothes and jewelry and sort of left them as piles on the floor because she was tired. The next morning she woke up and found them neatly folded and placed on the bureau. She couldn't explain it. The desk clerk's explanation was that she had a very 'neat' ghost :)

Another story involved a man who was researching a book on The Doors. He happened to stay in the suite that the group used to stay in back in the 60's. He was awoken in the middle of the night by what sounded like loud partying so he went to the window to see if there was a party in the garden below. When he got up, he realized the sound wasn't coming from outside, but from inside the room around him. He checked out of the hotel in the middle of the night.

Another woman had come down to the desk in the middle of the night and reported that she had been sleeping when she heard the window slide open and an intruder walk over to the bed where she was sleeping. Thinking the intruder might potentially harm her, she laid still in the bed. She then felt the intruder sit on the bed and lay down next to her. She lay there for a while waiting for something to happen, but nothing happened. She then turned in the bed to see her intruder and when she turned she saw nothing. And then she noticed that there were bars on the window to prevent someone from breaking in from outside and that the window had indeed been opened.

The most haunted room? 79. We were told not to stay in room 79 because it is the most haunted room. Even the hotel staff don't like to go in there. Apparently somebody died in that room? And several hotel guests have reported hearing knocks on the door, and seeing lines of ghosts pushing on the door trying to get into the the room. Furniture in that room gets moved into odd positions. One woman reported a head floating outside of that window. And even a straight-laced accountant reported hearing things in that room.

From the skeptics point of view, there was a lot of drug use in the hotel and some of these ghost sightings could easily be explained as hallucinations, or other brain processing anomalies in the middle of the night.

But there were so many reports of the same things from a wide variety of people that it makes the ghost stories seem very real. And sort of fun. Just as long as I'm not the one experiencing them.