One little girl’s quiet gasp was oddly audible amid the nonstop pep of the Little Rock Marathon’s Health and Fitness Expo.
Fingers splayed and reaching, 5-year-old Molly Forrest ducked behind her parents to retrieve something dropped, a trinket from the Army National Guard booth.
“She cares about medals, a lot,” said 9-year-old Jack Henry Forrest, in the chronically aggrieved tone of big brothers everywhere.
Molly clutched her bit of metal: “Well, to me they’re kind of special and important and that stuff” - pause - “yes, and important to me.
“I have lots of swim medals.
One really is a medal with a string that goes around your neck, and then the rest of them are” - pause - “ribbons.”
The bit of metal she clutched could have passed for a finishers medal from any number of marathons but certainly not for Little Rock’s, which gave this year’s finishers an “Epic” 8 ¼ -inch disc with a lightning bolt emblazoned down the middle.
Molly closed her eyes and smiled a bit like Mona Lisa.
And then slowly, silently, lifting one foot behind, she bent forward ballerina-style, holding her 2-inch medallion aloft.
Craig and Tanesha Forrest’s son Jack Henry watched this impromptu interpretive dance without comment.
Eventually, Molly returned to earth and the family collected her and had begun to amble away, when the boy turned back.
“But,” he stated, “in my opinion, it mostly really matters more if you win them by placing, more than those who get them for finishing.”
Medals ought to be earned?
“Yes. Earned. In my opinion.”
EARNED HOW?
“I think you can play around pound medal and have some fun with it from a marketing perspective, but that 2-pound medal wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t a true accomplishment,” says Joe DeSena, of the Little Rock Marathon’s famously enormous finishers reward.
This year’s marathon medal weighed about 2 ½ pounds. A superhero-and-comics-inspired design created by race organizers Gina Marchese Pharis and Geneva Lamm, it was manufactured by a sister company of medal distributor Hasty Awards of Ottawa, Kan., die-cut and enameled in white, blue, red and yellow with the race name, date, a cartoon lip “smack” and the theme word: “Epic!”
The big bolt of lightning served as the letter I.
DeSena lives in Vermont, and he has nothing to do with the Little Rock Marathon. But he does know something about medals and how the people who pay to play at amateur recreational athletic events feel about them. DeSena operates Spartan Race, an international series of obstacle course competitions. This year he tried to change his ordeals’ finishers medals, and outrage ensued (see accompanying story).
“I don’t think it’s the medal that makes the difference but I think it’s the accomplishment, and the medal just signifies the accomplishment,” he said.
“I think kids are smart enough to know - in this new society where everybody gets a trophy, right, playing soccer or these chosen sports - I think kids are smart enough to know they don’t really mean anything in that case.
“We really care about the medal and the award when we worked hard to get it.”
Which brings us to what happened March 2 at the Little Rock Marathon.
ADVERSITY
Actually there is no one true narrative of what happened after the first wave of early-start marathoners took off in livid darkness at 6 a.m., under ominously cloudy skies, followed two hours later by more marathoners, half-marathoners and 10K racers. There are about 12,000 stories, give or take, and all are more and less equally true.
Pharis, the event’s executive director, said Thursday that when lightning forced organizers to close the course early, at 11:30 a.m., her intention was that everyone still running the 13.1-or 26.2-mile events would be given a chance to cross the finish line and pick up a medal if they so desired. Those at Mile 22 and farther along would be shooed onto a shorter path and urged to move faster, and those behind them would be loaded into buses.
“They were supposed to be,” she said. “Our goal was to drop them off around the top of LaHarpe Boulevard or State Street so they could walk in and get the opportunity to cross the finish line and get a medal. That was important to me, and that miscommunication - there was confusion in the delivery of that message. There were some that were dropped off at State Street to walk in to the finish, and there were some that were dropped at the Marriott, and there were a lot of them that walked around here locally and called in to say ‘Come get me.’”
Stopping a footrace because of dangerous weather is standard procedure among well-managed events. “Everyone cancels for lightning,” said Carol Fenelon Earles, a fifth-grade teacher from Ravenden Springs. This was Little Rock Parks and Recreation’s 12th marathon, but it was her 200th.
Pharis was running the Chicago Marathon in 2011 when it was canceled - “black flagged” - because of severe heat. “And they rerouted us,” she said, “and they handed everybody a medal. They just handed it to us like they were tossing a ball to us.
“I didn’t finish it, and I don’t count it as one of my finishes, but what I learned from that event was incredibly valuable.
“People do want to have the option of taking the medal. I didn’t have to take it, but I wanted it, for the memory.
“So I think it was important that they offered it to us then, and I think it’s important that we offered it to ours.”MANY REACTIONS
Pharis said, “I have heard from some people who did get their medal and were so giddy that they got it and were crying with joy. And those were people who didn’t finish the distance but they still got to be there and be part of it. And they were happy.”
Earles knows of other happy racers and some who were upset. She set out at 6 a.m. surrounded by fellow members of Marathon Maniacs, an international club for people who run multiple 26.2 events every year (see accompanying story). She was able to cover the complete 26.2 route and so feels great about her medal. “But I’ve been reading all over Facebook where some people got medals but they’re just fuming, and then other people are considering it a nice long run with friends. That’s a very positive way. There’s just all kinds of ways to look at it.”
Including feeling kinda guilty.
“Does it count as a half-marathon if you get rerouted because of weather and cut a half-mile off?” one finisher posted on her Facebook page.
Hobbit Singleton, walking coach for the race’s training team, answers “countless” emails and cellphone calls during the event’s four months of training and before, during and after each marathon. With characteristic wry humor she said Tuesday, “I’ve gotten a couple about that.”
So many, in fact, that she and husband Tom Singleton, the team’s running coach, held a special group run in Little Rock on Saturday designed to let disappointed racers - wearing their race bibs - do whatever miles they missed March 2.
After all the hardships - pounding distance, hours of rain, plummeting temperatures, terrifying lightning - why would anyone not feel he’d done enough to earn a piece of metal he paid for when he entered the race?
“I understand that, totally, because I’ve been there and done that, where for one reason or another, I didn’t finish a race, usually that I was sick,” Hobbit Singleton said. “That’s even harder, when you have to make that decision yourself and you know in your brain it’s the right decision but your heart is just broken.” In the case of this Little Rock Marathon, she said, racers “didn’t make that decision, it was made for them. …
“You were out there in the cold, in the thunder, in the lightning, in the weather. It was shortened not because of anything you did but because for safety’s sake we had to do it,” Singleton says. “You deserve that medal.
“Absolutely they deserve that medal.”
Conway resident Cherie Smith Flowers, who was diverted to a shorter marathon, took hers gladly.
“For me personally, 2.5 pounds worth of race bling around my neck after a major accomplishment is a pretty big deal,” she said. “During several training runs leading up to the event, I doubted I could complete the marathon or just wanted to give up because I was tired and cold. Knowing there is a massive medal waiting at the end helped give me the drive I needed to complete the tough training runs.”
Singleton says, “The training is what it’s all about, anyway, making the commitment to do it. [Race day] is just one day. You really deserve a medal just for the training.”
MILES TO GO
we aren’t going to be directing traffic.’ But they still had that one lane of Cantrell blocked off. So we just went ahead and finished it.” Her time was 4:38:39.
“I have three very close friends that I trained with and run with that got diverted and didn’t get to finish, and that was around Mile 17. They earned that medal, to me, even though they didn’t do the whole 26.2, because I know what they put in to train for it,” Thrower said.
“They questioned that themselves, and I was like, ‘Come on, guys. I understand your frustration’ and I would probably feel the same way, but I said, ‘Go out and run the 8.2 miles or whatever that you didn’t get to finish, and there’s your marathon.’”
Earles has a friend from Texas, Chad Spilman, who refused his medal at the finish line.
“And I said, ‘Chad, you could take it and just put it down as ‘This is what I got for doing a 22-miler or something.’ But he wouldn’t,” Earles said. “And he was OK with it. He was not upset. He did not feel that he had wasted his time, his money, his day. But he did not want the medal.”
If she had been rerouted, Earles said, “I would not have said I completed a marathon - unless I finished and then ran around the parking lot for another four miles. But I was very fortunate that I didn’t get caught in that situation.”
At 11:30 a.m. March 2, Denise Ruthven Thrower of Little Rock found herself between Miles 22 and 23 in Riverdale with racers turning around and streaming back toward her. At first she thought they were cheaters cutting the course. “As I kept going I heard people saying, ‘The race has been canceled. You need to go get on a bus at Wal-Mart,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Whoa, I’m almost done.”’
Other racers around her were saying, “Wait a second, we don’t want to stop.” People around her kept going.
“As we got up there, the police officers were like, ‘If you go it’s going to be at your own risk, EPIC Marathoning is a species of tourism. Fancy medals help convey the impression that an event is worth a trip.
At the expo booth of the Waddell & Reed Kansas City Marathon, race directors Daveron Kennedy and Molly Fiedler said finishers’ medals are the third most expensive line item in the budget of their events, which drew 12,000 in 2013, “because now it is all about the medals. That’s why people race. You have to keep up with everybody else,” as Kennedy put it.
Denise Malan, author of the forthcoming book Runner’s Bucket List: 200 Races to Run Before You Die (Triumph Books, April), says she includes the Little Rock Marathon in a chapter titled “Bag the Best Swag” because it has that big medal. Her book is aimed at running tourists and provides examples of interesting events in 25 categories.
The 2011 Little Rock Marathon was Malan’s own first 26.2-miler. “I know some people don’t care about the medals or kind of make fun of those of us who really care about them or make fun of Little Rock for having such a large medal. But to me, it’s not the physical medal but what it represents. And I thought it was really cool that Little Rock recognizes what a huge achievement it is to run a marathon and I think you should have a medal that represents that. …
“They’re so heavy that when you finish the race, and you are so tired, and when a volunteer puts it on your neck, literally, you droop.”
Pharis said she and Lamm have no idea whether Little Rock’s 2015 medal will be bigger or should be bigger. “Wenever know the answer to that,” Pharis said. “We always think it’s too big, too, and then when we design it, we come out with a bigger one. We don’t know until it’s designed.”
But one thing she does know about the 2015 medal. It will not include any lightning bolts.
“Hell no,” she said.
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 03/10/2014