2012 Because magazines like this have long “lead times,” I’m writing this editorial for the March/April issue four days before the world comes to an end, at least according to the folks who gave us Y2K and other such travesties of the predictive arts. (Obviously, “arts” is more appropriate than “sciences.”) I want to get this into the M&B archives so it’s there for whatever subsequent species comes along to take our place out of the ruins of a world many think we’ve disappointed, or, for the more radical, raped. I hope that it will provide a little insight into the Year in Marathoning 2012, which was a more-interesting-than-usual year from several perspectives, perhaps because it will be the last year we get to do this. The year had just about everything, from more-rapid-than-usual growth in a specific company to a pair of Olympic marathons totally different from previous Olympic marathons. It had severe heat and floods and then some more floods. And now we’re waiting for the apocalypse. May we live in interesting times. The year started out with The Competitor Group (the folks who peppered the planet with Rock ’n’ Roll marathons

and half-marathons) drinking a case of Red Bull in order to schedule more and more of their signature races so they could elevate the profile and the profit margin of the company to make it increasingly attractive to a potential buyer. It makes perfect sense, and it’s done all the time in business. In the process, the company received mixed reviews: some favorable from runners who enjoyed the new venues, and some apprehensive from long-running race directors who feared that the whole process was overwhelming the sport and creating a format that new runners might think is supposed to extend to all races, big and small. In the end, The Competitor Group did find a suitor in the folks who own and put on the Tour de France. If we can manage to escape the flames or the floods or whatever means the Mayans have in mind for our destruction, 2013 should be a very interesting year on this front. I do hope The Competitor Group hurried to the bank to cash the check before Friday’s destruction of the world as we know it. In January, the folks in Dallas hosted both the men’s and the women’s US Olympic Marathon Trials. As expected,

their organization was flawless. The criterion course was excellent, attempted to replicate the criterion course the runners were going to experience in London later in the summer, and was a spectator’s dream. The only shortcoming was all of the concrete in the downtown portions of the course, which was hard on the legs of the competitors. The Dallas organizers put on their regularly scheduled marathon the next day, and that was followed by the annual Running USA conference. All in all, it was a mighty fine exercise in race management. And what a way to go out! They went out on top of the last US Olympic Marathon Trials ever to be held on planet Earth. Then there was April and the annual trip to Boston, where the weather can

be anything from snowflakes to furnace. This year it was furnace’s turn—perhaps a practice run by the Mayan high priests for what’s to come at the end of the year, should it come by solar flare. The B. A. A., in a wisdom not always apparent by organizers of anything (from marathon to July 4 parades), offered the option to runners who were not heat trained to defer their entry to 2013. The offer was magnanimous and heartfelt and was appreciated by many runners, but not as many opted for the deferral as we thought, probably figuring that, since the world is going to end on December 21, this would be the last opportunity to run the famed race. As predicted, race day didn’t quite dawn . . . it more or less erupted on the runners, with the mercury hitting 80 degrees at

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the start in Hopkinton. Sensing the need for extra volunteers, my brother and I volunteered to help. (Over the years, we have developed an extensive itinerary on race day, one that includes listening to the mayor’s Patriots’ Day speech, dropping by the Brattle Book Store, hiking back along the course, dropping in on a pub or two along the course, and so forth.) We spent this year’s race on Boylston Street handing out melting PowerBars to exhausted runners. As frequently happens, the volunteering experience was so satisfying that, if we get past December 21, we may just volunteer again next year. If the world does end, know that our intentions were honorable. The following month, the Prague International Marathon hosted the AIMS World Congress, which celebrated its 30th anniversary as an organization founded by race directors for race directors and their clients, dedicated to elevating the art and science of putting on a race on the streets and roads of hundreds of courses around the world. The next Congress will be in Durban, South Africa, in 2014 . . . if the doomsayers are wrong about December 21. The London Games marathons were typical of Olympic marathons. The winners were impossible to call in advance. Both were complete surprises, as Olympic marathon winners frequently are. Unlike the 2008 Olympic marathons, where unlikely runners went out early and dared the rest of the field to go with them, and failing to do so, the field lost and the brash and

daring runners prevailed, this year the outcome wasn’t apparent until the final miles. The course, tough but colorful and entertaining, added to the strategy and the challenge. Hats off to London and to the two fresh faces wearing the gold. Sorry your careers will be so short. Then there was Sandy. Like many a hurricane, it was followed for more than a week with as much avidity as a paparazzi stalking the starlet of the moment. Computer programs compared notes on the predicted path but pretty much agreed when and where the thousand-mile-wide monster was going to hit. (Could the Mayan calendar makers have been off by six or seven weeks and Sandy was supposed to be the end?) Like the perfect storm, Hurricane Sandy drove to the northwest, saturated with warm ocean water, while a nor’easter came down out of the north, and to make the mix even more awesome, bracing Arctic air came scudding across the north middle of the country, all of it headed toward a confluence with the heart of the East Coast. The Marine Corps Marathon came off on what turned out to be a lovely autumn day, getting itself in before Sandy’s slow but steady pace could bring it onshore. New York City the next weekend wasn’t so lucky. More than enough words have been spewed over what should have been done regarding the marathon. Days of going back and forth, back and forth between the mayor’s office and the New York Road Runners accomplished nothing but ramped-up chaos. It’s easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback and

preach what should have been, but even while the confusion over whether the marathon would be held or would be canceled, it was apparent that changing your mind about whether to jump off the railroad tracks when the 4:15 out of Poseidon Station is barreling down on you is deadly. Part of our problem these days is paralysis. Everyone is so scared of criticism that they often do nothing or do something when it’s too late. There are too few who step forward and, damn the torpedoes, make a decision and then stick by it. As much as busybodies and frustrated critics are ready to pounce on the outcome of a decision that may not have worked out perfectly, even they would offer grudging admiration for someone who steps up and does the hard thing. There were no winners in New York City when it came to the marathon, only an enormous number of losers. But through the criticism and the approbation, many of the runners who came to New York for the race left with a feeling of camaraderie among themselves. They would have felt even

better with something cogent coming out of the NYRR HQ. And, in spite of the no-refunds stand, the NYRR would have scored much-needed points if, the day after the police and fire departments in New York returned the money to the NYRR for police and fire protection, it had turned around and refunded at least that portion of entry fees to runners; it was, after all, not the marathon’s money now that the police and fire departments returned it. Hey, a no-refund philosophy is a no-refund philosophy but one that the police and fire departments had the good grace to ignore. To cap off the weird weather trifecta, California at the end of November experienced what some were predicting as the Golden State’s Katrina as a trio of large storms lined up in the Pacific and, like unwelcome visiting relatives, marched in one after the other, dumping swimming pools of rain on the state. Unlike Sandy, however, these were Pineapple Expresses, a series of storms coming from the vicinity of Hawaii where the water was warm, and because it was warm, there was

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a lot of it, but it wasn’t frigid and had no intentions of turning cold. At the California International Marathon in Sacramento on December 1, the rains came in like damp curtains on pulleys, pushed through by high winds acting as stagehands, flooding streams and parts of the course but eventually petering out before the end of the race. There was so much rain that where I live we have, at this point in the rainy season, three times the amount of rain we had last year. But it was nowhere as bad as it has been some years; the Russian River barely burped over its banks, and the new storms we’ve been having as I write this are cold from the north and persistent. The parts of California that were hit with brushfires and forest fires several years ago are now suffering mudslides because the hillsides have no grass or shrubbery to hold the earth in. That’s what California does: it wallows in disasters, from earthquakes to mudslides to heat waves to floods to forest fires to all the things that godless California has earned over the centuries. It has gotten to the point that out here in California we might not even notice when the end comes on December 21, but just to be sure that something survives, I’ve been saving my beer and wine bottles, and I’m putting copies of this column inside and sealing them with candle wax. I’ve set a dozen bottles out on the front stoop so that if the end is by floodwaters, they’ll sail away to somewhere where people of the future will learn that this was one helluva year

for marathoning. So if you’re reading this in Marathon & Beyond, ignore everything I wrote above about the end of the world. However, if you’re reading this as a rolled-up set of pages you pulled out of a three-quarter-liter bottle of Russian River Winery 2010 pinot noir, well, you know the rest. Postscript: The day before the scheduled end of the world on December 21 and seven weeks after the scheduled ING New York City Marathon, the New York Road Runners, organizers of the race, announced that runners would be eligible to receive full refunds of their entry fees, minus the $11 charge for entering the lottery to gain entry. Those who wished to run the race at a future date (in 2013, 2014, or 2015) would be guaranteed entry, but would both have to re-pay the entry fee set for the 2012 race, and forfeit their entry fee for the 2012 race. Included in that lost entry fee is the fee assessed to pay for fire and police protection that was not delivered. Assuming the world does not end on December 21, hopefully over the next years, the NYRR will be able to regain its vaulted position as a positive nonprofit entity within the borders of the Greater New York City area. And hopefully, after all the water evaporates and the houses of devastated New Yorker and Jerseyites are rebuilt, the situation will generate a perspective that restores the NYRR’s well-earned place on the East Coast landscape. —Rich Benyo