Starting Them Young

After the Junior Mount Marathon race and after the women racers were scrambling up that steep mountainside, the street belonged to the six and under group.  The mini racers lined up on the starting line in waves according to age.

Sort of.  Mostly there was a gaggle of moms, dads, and kids, with all the adults giving last minute encouragement and coaching tips.

In a sea of reds, whites, and blues--and a lot of pinks and purples--the six-year-old girls were the first to start.

But first, there was the traditional sizing up the competition.

Or, admiring the competition's dress.  Or maybe the hair-do.

The boys, however, weren't into fashion.  They were all about muscles and whipping the competition.

This isn't kung fu, son, this is a footrace...

Another wave of boys raced up the block from the bank to the fire station, about maybe perhaps could be somewhere close to a half a block maybe more or less and somewhere in the vicinity of.

"Toeing the mark" doesn't mean leaning backwards, 394.  Put your weight forward on the foot, or you'll be left...

...uh, behind...

The next wave of girls came to the starting line.  Keep your eye on the wily competitor in the race--the little girl at the far left in maroon sweater and pink and white print skirt, bib number 53.

And there she goes!   Wait!!!   Does she or doesn't she???   Is she part of this age group?  Does she just want to run with the big girls?

Too late now.  Up the road she goes.   Is she so far behind she thinks she's in the lead?  Or did she get a jump on her age group?

Grandpa to the rescue.


Clear the trail.  Here come the four year old girls!

Like a thundering herd of ..... boys.

Minus one.

That's the way, Sweetie.  Give the competition the old fish eye.

The call went out for the three year old girls.

Well, we all know what girls are like, don't we?

Hold my dolly, daddie.

Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom first.

The two year old boys and girls race was more mom and pop than boy and girl.

Okay, whose race is this, anyway?

Not this kid's.

And then, one boy turned around and came back.

I like to think he's a big brother. But, even his coaxing couldn't get the lad up the street.

Who had the most fun with this?  The kids?  The moms and dads?  The race officials?  The spectators?  Yeah, all those had fun.

But absolutely the most fun of all was had by this tyke in bib number 2.  Even the starting lineup was a kick.

Keep your eye on that starting official.  He can sneak up on a guy.

He thought he'd stick around an extra minute or so and enjoy the moment, even after the other kids ran off.

That's him on the far left.

Hey, wait for me!  I'm on the way!

I'm right here.

So what if he stops a couple times mid-course and looks around with a big grin on his face?  He's savoring the moment, man, enjoying the cheers, hearing the applause.  Guy's gotta soak it all in, you know.  This race only happens once a year.


Eventually all the mini-racers had cleared the street, just in time for a pink blur to come swooshing through on a blistering pace.

Olympic Nordic ski team member Kikkan Randall just before she wins the women's race.

And a great time was had by all.


(PS:  My 16 year old friend Miles Knotek was pretty sore today after winning the Mount Marathon Junior Boys race with the second fastest time on record.   He didn't spend today doing what I'd do, that is, he didn't lie on the couch moaning while downing a bottle of Aleve.  He went on a 15 mile run through the Lost Lake mountain area.)

Stars and .... More Stars

It's probably the shortest marathon run in the world, but for endurance-testing is has to be number one.  The 84th running of the Mt. Marathon race, a mile and a half up a 3022 foot mountain and back down again for a total of three miles, the race is the premier mountain race in Alaska.

I set my alarm extra early last night to get up early enough to be in Seward for the 9:30 AM start of the juniors race.  As usual on the Fourth of July, I drove around the narrow streets of Seward for some time before I found a place to park.  Then I walked over to main street.

Here they are, all lined up on Seward's main street for the morning start of the Mt. Marathon Junior race.  At the starter's signal, they were off and running uphill.

 The large light spot on the mountain is the turn-around point for the juniors.

 Then, less than a half hour later, a long, lean runner came flying down the street towards the finish line.  He was all alone.  Here comes my friends Miles, the one I wrote about in "Running Away" on June 22.

I missed part of him because I was trying to lead with the camera to keep up with him.  Notice he's in no distress whatsoever.

 There he goes towards the timer.

 And he's in at 26 minutes, 18 seconds.   Reportedly, this is the second fastest time ever recorded by a junior racer in the history of the race.  He smoked the next finisher by about a minute and fifteen seconds.

 Every woman in Moose Pass wants to fix Miles a hearty meal, but Miles has inherited his dad's lean build.

Proud Dad Kevin and Junior Champion Miles Knotek. The mountain is behind them.

The women's race started next, going all the way to the top of the mountain.  Two of Alaska's Olympic team Nordic skiers battled it out side by side to the top of the mountain and all the way down.  Within sight of the finish line, Kikkan Randall pulled ahead of Holly Brooks to claim the women's title in around 52 minutes.

A crowd of women racers at the half way point.

Then, we waited.  Ate a reindeer hot dog.  Waited some more.  Clapped and cheered as woman after woman ran down main street to the finish line.  Waited some more.

Finally, at almost two and a half hours, came the announcement.  Joy Eastman, my long-time friend, was on main street.  I turned on the camera and leaned out over the barriers.

Joy, 66, was running the race in honor of her son Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Chris Eastman, who was killed in Afghanistan in July a year ago.  Chris has run the junior's race several times, in addition to be a star athlete at Seward High School.

 Accompanying her to the finish line are Joy's son Buddy on the left, and her son Jason carrying the Marine Corps flag on the right.

Buddy is from Joy's first family of four;  Jason is the eldest of four boys Joy adopted as her second family.  Chris was one of those four boys.  Jason won the junior race twice
.

And she's done it.  Her first Mt. Marathon run.  The crowd went wild, applauding and cheering.  Chris was a much-loved young man.

In the picture below, Joy is trying to convince her namesake granddaughter Joy (the older of Chris's two daughters), that the bleeding scratch on her calf really doesn't hurt.  Little Joy is skeptical and is sure Grandma is injured.

 Well, Joy and the rest of us hurt all right, but it isn't from scratches and cuts.  We miss Chris.  I watched him grow up to be one the finest young men I've ever known.



(If women and kids run this race, you might think, it can't be all that tough.  Uh-huh.  Go to the address below and take a look at the gallery of photographs there. You'll have to copy it and paste it in your browser. There's a phenomenal one of Miles coming down the mountain.)


http://www.adn.com/2011/07/04/1951090/2011-mount-marathon.html#id=1951086&view=large_view

For the Anchorage Daily News' story about Joy:

http://www.adn.com/2011/07/03/1950202/mother-will-race-mount-marathon.html

"...certain unalienable rights..."

The fourth day of July in 1776 is when it all went down, to use a current colloquialism.  Wow.  That’s two hundred and thirty-five years ago.  Ancient history.  So far in the past it may as well have been in the cretaceous age when T-Rex was king of the hill.

Or is it?

Two hundred and thirty-five years is three of my lifetimes plus fourteen years.  Three.  Three times seventy plus 14 years.

My life so far seems to have passed in a flash, if I forget about a few terrifying times when time stood still.  A second seventy years would be like a moment and a third seventy like taking a deep breath.  After that, fourteen is nothing, though when I WAS fourteen I thought I’d neeeeever reach twenty-one.

When I look at it like that, it really wasn’t so long ago that those delegates to the Continental Congress declared our independence from the Great Britain, which they did on July 2.  *

The document known as Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which justified the prior act of the Congress, was adopted on July 4 to make our mutiny legal.  Then to confuse things further, most of the delegates didn’t even sign it until August 2, when a nice clean unmarked copy was available.

George Washington, camped with his troops near New York, heard about it Aug. 9.  Fortunately for him and all the rest of the “traitors,” the British in London weren’t clued in on the news until Aug. 30. 

Remember, they didn’t have Twitter and that document had to be written with a quill dipped in ink and it’s pretty hard to erase ink.  No ballpoint pens or ink jet printers, either. 

Now that we’ve condensed time and made it more relevant, let’s consider the constitution and Bill of Rights that came after our independence.

I have the easy part in all this.

I can gripe about my government officials ad nauseum and no gendarmes will appear to put me in the “care” of my government, assuming I haven’t threatened them with anything stronger than not voting for them again. 

I can attend meetings where others gripe.  I can own firearms as long as I abide by the laws governing their use and don’t point them at anyone in a threatening manner. 

I am not bound to worship in a church that is the church of the land.  I can choose my own religion.  Or not. 

If I’m suspected of committing a crime, a myriad of court rulings ensure I have a fair trial, including being judged by a jury of my peers, but “peers” is a word that really needs some fine-tuning if you ask me.  I don’t have to testify against myself or incriminate myself.

I don’t have to surrender my home if the military needs quarters for its men, unless I agree to it.  If there’s shooting in my area, you can bet I’ll invite a bunch of young, strong, well-armed soldiers into my home.  I’ll even cook for them and do their laundry.

I have the right to choose those who will represent me at the local, state, and national level.  Then I can gripe endlessly about what buffoons they are and the next election day, I can vote them out of office. 

The newspapers, radio, and television are not the mouth of the government.  They’re the mouth of whoever owns them, sometimes, but those same documents guarantee those owners the right to mouth off.  It’s up to us to find the Waldo-of-Truth in all that print and noise.

Which brings me to my responsibilities in all this.  I pledge allegiance to my country.  I vow to protect that Constitution.  I promise to abide by the laws that create a society for the betterment of us all. 

I’m considered equal in the eyes of the law, but I am not guaranteed equality in all things.  I must work for my comfort and for what I want.  If I want to be president of this country, I have the right to strive for that position.  It takes work; it won’t be given to me.

As I said, I have the easy part.

The hard part was performed by my friend Chris and all the other men and women like him who, for three of my lifetimes, have and are protecting, defending, and sacrificing for me.

My gratitude to them is sincere, bottomless, and everlasting.

We don’t have a perfect country.  It is, as the saying goes, “a work in progress.” But it’s the best one I know.

*Source:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/top-5-myths-about-july-4/2011/07/03/AGe6YmwH_blog.html

Beginnings and Endings

Part One


 The race has already started.  Not THE race, but the race to get to where THE race starts.  And it doesn't start until the Fourth of July.

Nonetheless, there's a steady stream of traffic heading towards the small town of Seward.  By Monday, the population of about three thousand will swell into the tens of thousands, no little feat for a town grasping onto a narrow strip of land at the base of several mountains.  First street is the first road built at the mountains' base; Fifth Street is the last street before saltwater and the hundreds of motorhomes parked there in summer.

Let the crowding begin.

 Before it's all over, there will be more than three hundred motorhomes and camper trailers parked slide out by rear view mirror on this beach of Resurrection Bay, and hundreds more scattered in private and temporary RV parks around town, as well as dozen and dozens of tent camps.  The million dollar view is quite appropriate to the millions of dollars worth of RVs.

It's doubtful that many of them noticed the blue and white signs posted at the entrances to the camp sites. 

Read this.

 What a scramble that would be--a tsunami siren going off in the midst of all the July Fourth festivities when the town is packed with visitors and all the city  roads are jammed with cars of every description, and there's only one road out town.  But I suspect only the officials whose job it is to worry about such things will think about that little problem.

Indeed, most folks will be fixated on the premier event of this three-day weekend holiday--the 84th running of the Mt. Marathon world-famous race.

Seward's main street.

It begins on main street and ends on main street.   A block or so from the start line, past one of the town's two banks and past both of it's Chinese restaurants, runners turn the corner at the phone company building with the Iditarod Trail mural painted on its side.   Mile one of this historic trail begins at water's edge in Seward.

 The uphill street grows even steeper as it passes the Senior Center, also with a mural, this one of the  Mt. Marathon race.  Two women training for the race were reduced to a walk already.

 Two blocks farther uphill the course passes by the local hospital, and it hasn't even reached the mountain yet.

Then, a bit further into Lowell Canyon, the real ascent begins, just beyond a mound covered in wildflowers.

Wild columbine.

The racers won't stop to read the large sign posted at the spot, the one that has a photo of the mountain's various named spots on the trail, but the spectators can learn a lot by looking at it.

There's advice on how to run the trail...

...identification of the nice plants in the area...

 and the not-very-nice-at-all plants the racers are likely to encounter on the mountain.

Well, it's all uphill from here.

Until, of course, you're on the way down from the 3022 foot top.  And, on the way down often involves sliding down the steep parts on one's butt.

Two young racers in training after their run.

Then it's past the hospital ER again.  Or not.  Some crawl or are carried in for treatment.  A couple blocks farther downhill, make the turn at the phone company and stagger past the fire station.  Or not.  The fire hall is not only the best place in town to watch the race, it's also set up as an emergency treatment station.

Seward Fire Station

 Just downhill is the finish line for those that make it that far.  The record time for the men's race is 43 minutes and 23 seconds, set by Bill Spencer.

For the spectators, there are numerous vendor booths set up on the streets, and every business in town will be over-whelmed.

One of the oldest continuing businesses in Seward.

Yes, Carhartt fits right in here.

Oh, dear, how I wanted this rain jacket.

B&H also "sells" men's collars.

And in the same building is Sweet  Darlings.

One of the restaurants on main street.

The Yukon Bar, one of the long-time watering holes.

But along with the spruced-up storefronts, every so often there's a reminder that Seward has been here for more than a century and with that longevity comes a bunch of history.

When all the celebrating's done, you've had your barbequed chicken plate in the parking lot of the Catholic Church or a sampling from any of the numerous food vendors and restaurants in town, it's time to head out of town.  Merge into the long line of traffic and pass by the exclusive homes above the lagoon.

 Just there, as you pass the small boat harbor on the right...

...look up and slightly to your left.  Up there on the hillside, on one of the streets marked as a tsunami escape route, is a large, cream-colored building.  It grabs your attention and stands like a sentinel over this town, reminding everyone in the know of a large chunk of Alaska's history..

Years ago, an important part of that history was crafted by a young Alaskan native boy who lived in the building, a lad who imagined something that one day would be known as, "the best in the nation."

But first, bite the bullet and pull out of traffic into the small park at the far end of the lagoon, the place where the flags are....

 (to be continued)