Sal Citarella MY MOST UNFORGETTABLE MARATHON @ 135

Another recreation area that we visited briefly was the weight room. It seemed to be well used. As is typical of such places, there were more men standing around than there were men lifting at any one time. I guess standing around becomes part of one’s life at Bridgewater—just like in a gym.

At one point, one of the insiders commented on a room filled with computers that weren’t being used because there was no instructor, which seemed unfair and frustrating to him.

The race itself would be conducted in the yard. The yard was a fairly large, grassed recreation area, complete with a cinder trail that followed the wall around the perimeter. “Large,” however, is a relative term. A football field is large, except when you want to run a marathon. The Bridgewater yard is larger than that but still less than a half mile in circumference. The track is 0.4477272 mile long according to the official handout. That calculates to 58.559645 laps to a marathon.

Acounter recorded the splits for every runner. The splits were available to each runner afterwards, and they provided a valuable record of one’s performance—or lack thereof. By consulting the splits after the race, I could tell exactly the location of my personal Wall.

My counter was a likeable enough guy, who wanted to talk more than I did. Thad my race face on and was also unsure of just how much we might have in common. I did learn that following his return from Vietnam and release from the military “They put me in here!” He had already done 17 years. That was a sobering thought. I don’t recall that he ever said why he was in, and I wasn’t inclined to pry.

To increase interest in running, both for insiders and outsiders, Chain Gang hosted several events simultaneously. Races of 10K, half-marathon, 30K, and the full marathon were run together. As you can imagine, this resulted in runners of various levels of skill going off at different paces. Lapping was frequent. I tried to keep track of my own laps in my head but couldn’t do it. Didn’t I trust my counter? I won’t answer that. However, we all become a little paranoid when it comes to believing race times or distances.

Water and hard candy were reliably available at least once every circuit. I noted that the young men handing out water wore rubber gloves. First and last time I’ve seen that, and I really didn’t want to know the reason; but let’s just assume it had to do with sanitation.

Invariably during the day, as I pursued another runner, I would come back to the thought “Is he one of them—or one of us’” I realize that sounds prejudiced, but society had already judged these men and found them unfit to mix with us freely. So I decided that anyone with bulked-up shoulders was one of them. Aheavy upper body would be the result of too much free time and access to the weight room.

Another riddle that occupied my mind was why the women chose to run here. They must have felt very much on display—and vulnerable.

One might argue that to experience the marathon race, it should be run in a sterile, perhaps boring environment. All else is a distraction from the basic task of putting one foot in front of the other at the maximum sustainable rate for a distance of 26.2 miles. Big Sur is an outstanding coastline along which a marathon is run; Heartbreak Hill is one point in the course of Boston. These locations are not the marathon. They can even distract a runner if the objective is to run rather than to sightsee.

There were about 30 entrants in the marathon and that many in the shorter events. The winning time was 2:55. My 3:19 was satisfying and so was the Sal Citarella MY MOST UNFORGETTABLE MARATHON @ 137

I started running in high school in New York City more than 40 years ago. My first marathon was in Missouri in 1969, and I’ ve done more than 40 marathons and ultras since then. The list includes the course of the old Yonkers Olympic qualifier, New York City when it was still held in Central Park, a PR of 2:38 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the first marathon run in the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1982. lalways raced my marathons. Just finishing a marathon is a much more recent concept. Even though “My Most Unforgettable” was run more than 10 years ago, my best times were already behind me.

Several dog-eared scrapbooks chronicle it all and allowed me to pull out the few statistics I’ve provided. The rest is unforgettable memories shaded by time.

My work in construction causes me to relocate frequently, which has given me the opportunity to race in many states and some overseas locations. I’ve never traveled any great distance just to race.

Thad even run a previous prison event: the Los Lunas half-marathon at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in 1988. That was a very different situation. Because of the flat, lunar environment of New Mexico, the mixed field of inmates and visitors simply ran out the prison gate and down the road. No one was going to suddenly disappear from view.

Since my aged knees will no longer allow me to hammer my marathons, I have recently been doing primarily trail runs and trail SOKs.

Rove IS universal. Inside the walls, outside the walls, on this side of the world, on the other, running is a basic human activity. The astronauts even ran on the moon, although it looked more like skipping than running. Running is simple. Running is special. Running is simply special.

In a constructive setting, people are just people. The prison environment did shade our experience but more so in the trip from the outside to get to the cinder track. Once we began running, we were all runners, not insiders and outsiders.