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All Change.
Not running in Madrid has left me with the feeling that there is unfinished business to attend to. It's as if I have been cheated. Right up until Saturday night I was thinking that maybe I would run. I knew that it was not wise to run and I had also given a commitment to the organizers to be a helper. I think that subconciously I ran 13 km at slightly faster than my half marathon pace on Friday to stop myself from doing something silly on Sunday.
It was good to meet up with Antonio. Nice to put a face to the writing. To Antonio, I should apologise for talking so much in my limited castellano and not enough in english. Working in the baggage store was an interesting experience as a very good work-out aswell. The army had set everything up the night before so at 8.00 on Sunday morning all we had to do was collect our volunteers bib and chose a tent. To work out which tent to leave one's bag, one had to look at the final digit of the race number. I chose number 7. There were four of us in the store and armed with plastic bags and 2 marker pens, we set about our task.
Given that there were about 12,000 runners we would have had a little less than 1,200 bags in our store. We opened at 8.00 with a trickle of runners. We worked out our system, which was to be rows for thousands plus an extra row for the ladies. We had two guys writing the numbers on the bags and two putting the bags in place. The system worked fairly well until the majority of the runners arrived at about 9.15. At this point we had a queue of about 100 runners all panicking that they would not have time to warm up. At this point it was a case of lobbing the bags wherever we could, in the general direction of their specified row.
There was a rather ugly incident when one runner, who was not wearing his number demanded that we take his bag, but rightly we refused, how could we identify that it was his for a start? Secondly, if he didn't have a race number, he was not part of the race. But this ended up in a very heated debate between this runner, his wife and the other three helpers in our store. I kept things moving on the bag front as best I could until the race organizers and security removed this runner, then things calmed down again.
We had cleared the bulk of our runners by 9.35, with a few stragglers quickly depositing their belongings before scurrying off in the direction of Cibeles Fountain and the start line. Once the race was underway my three compañeros wandered off to find a vantage point to watch a bit of the marathon. I looked at the tent, with bags scattered eveywhere and no space to walk, let alone retreive a bag. I don't know how, but the 4 veterans in tent 6 had everything neatly stacked, aisles wide enough to drive a bus down and were quietly relaxing with cofee and croissants.
In other tents, the occupants were busy rearranging the bags, trying to find some kind of order. An hour after the start, and with no sign of my crew, I decided that I'd have to somehow forge a few aisles in our sea of blue plastic bags. And by the time the first DNF arrived I had a six inch aisle between the hundreds and 1000's, again between 2000's and 3000's, 4's & 5's and so on.
By the time my team returned there was a trickle of non finishers arriving, each with a story of woe, some with injuries, sprains and pulled muscles, others who went off too fast and, as said many 'ran with their heart and not their head'. I made a point of asking each of our runners how they got on, commiserating with those who didn't finish, congratulating all those who did. I had to prompt my team to congratulate the finishers, I think they had forgotten that these guys had just run 42 kilometers in intolerably hot conditions. We had all sorts, returning to collect their bags, those who were knackered, with not an ounce of energy left to say anything, others who were extatic to have finished, others disappointed with their time, all sorts. Our system worked well and nobody had to wait more than a minute or so for their bag, there's nothing worse than having to wait in a queue for ages to collect your belongings.
At 3.45 we closed up shop, there were still 5 bags remaining, these runners were either in the dist cart, the first aid tent or had been transferred to hospital. Around 100 runners were tranferred to hospital, mainly with heat stroke, let's hope they are all OK now.
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