St. George Marathon
Published by DanM October 4th, 2007 in Southern Utah Places.The Red Rock Run
On Saturday, October 6, the running of the 29th St. George Marathon will take place. They’ll close down highway 18 and run from the little town of Central, nestled in the shadow of Pine Valley Mountain, all the way down to St. George. The race will start in the cold gray dawn at 6:45 AM. Brrrr! And each of 6,700 runners will have paid $60 for the privilege! (Hey! 8800 people applied and they have to hold a lottery to award the places. Some things about human nature will always be a mystery to me.)
But it’s not so bad! This marathon is downhill pretty much all the way. In fact, you drop more than 2,500 feet over the course of the race. To put that in perspective, if you ran it twice and dropped the same elevation, you would just about be at sea level.
That explains some interesting statistics. The top runner’s time in the Boston Marathon is about 2 hours and 7 minutes. St. George doesn’t attract runners from Kenya, however, so our top time last year was about 2 hours and 18 minutes. But the wheel chair result for Boston was 1 hour and 25 minutes while ours was 1 hour and 17 minutes. I’ll bet the ride down some of those hills is pretty intense!
If you can make it, there are lots of great places to watch and cheer along the route. And if you can’t, then the 2007 Butch Cassidy 10K Run/5K Walk from Springdale in beautiful Zion Canyon to the Grafton ghost town is coming up on Saturday, November 3, 2007.
How far is it from Springdale to Grafton? And seriously, how do the wheelchair competitors go down steep grades? And, as I recall, the weather is still pretty nice down there the first part of November, isn’t it? And (brother of mine), the word privilege does NOT have a “d” in it! (But in every other way, you are darn-near perfect.)
Well, it’s …. ummmmm … 10K from Springdale to Grafton and 5K from the Rockville bridge to Grafton. I think it has to do with the fact that this is a 10K run/5K walk race.
And there aren’t any steep grades on that road. The marathon in St. George is a different story. Like they say, “No guts, no glory!”
What “d”? — There’s no “d” in privilege!