Scenes from the Salt Lake Marathon and Bike Tour

Annie braved her first mass start road ride of the year Saturday morning. She and her friend Marco joined the roadies to ride the marathon route before the runners started pounding the pavement. Here they are post ride at the gateway.

Props to Steve, who wins crew/husband of the day for getting up at 4:00 am to drive them to the start, and then wait the couple of hours for them to come in. Steve's also a helluva bike rider - have spent some time hurting while chasing him around the local crits. Steve and I were laughing about the genious behind this bike ride - pretty good idea for any running race organizer I would think, you've already got the cleared roads/route, may as well offer it up to the bikers an hour before you send off the runners, and try to get them to pay $40 bucks to ride it. It was not short on participants.

I keep a list of thoughts/ideas of stuff that might be fun when I retire from banking, and have some ideas towards founding a race/event promotions organization that I may venture to put together someday. Have seen some fantastic outfits and seen some sorry ones - can assure you there's still plenty of room in this space.

Anyway, Annie and Marco had a great ride, got whistled at, got invited into a paceline, got through the merger with the 5k runners unscathed, and rolled into the gateway safely. Here's one suggestion to the Marathon organizers - you guys have got to run the bikes down the middle of gateway to finish under the official race finish line, here's why. Steve and I sat and laughed to each other at the closing effort some of these citizen ride riders why closing out with at the end of the ride, which was routed around the back of Gateway vs. down the middle of it where the run finishes. We saw some good sprints, and Steve had seen a bunch previously when the early finishers were coming in. This was a big moment of glory for some folks, and I'm not kidding, you run these cats down the middle of gateway, with those crowds lining the streets yelling - your going to multiply those glory sprints fivefold, and by default, the entertainment value for your crowds tenfold. We saw it happen plenty of times with the runners - some get juiced from the energy from the crowds and it doesn't matter if they'd walked the whole race to that point, or had hit it hard and were about to kill over, they come around that corner and it's on, it turns into 45 seconds to capture olympic glory. No doubt you'd get plenty of the same from the bikes, which is maybe the reason behind sending them around back. Regardless - Steve and I had some good chuckles about the glory sprints among other things while watching runners come in.

We split from Steve and Marco and met up with some family - Tom who rode that morning and was there to watch Laurie finish her first half marathon, and Amy and Aaron (who also rode that morning) were there to watch Courtney finish her first half marathon. Congrats to both - they did awesome!

Kylie was so fired up after watching all the racing that she came home, threw on her race gear, which consists of an xterra jersey, filled the pockets with 3 1/2 days of food, and was off. The kids are digging spring, they love being outside.