Apparently Marathon Running not only gives me a high, but it also heigh-tens the senses...especially the sense of humor. Here is the first of my many ZANY race observations:
Homeless Commentary
Five minutes after crossing the start line, we jogged past a homeless guy, setting out for his day in the predawn hours. His overloaded shopping cart was an imposing mountain that caused the runner stream to part dangerously like the Red Sea to avoid him. The parallel route he had chosen cut a moving patch of empty asphalt through thousands of hyped racers. Because we were at the back edge of the crowd, we had no trouble jogging slowly by.
"Bedah hurrie, or you neva goina make it," he called out as we passed him on the street. Excuse us?! The nerve! We laughed at the sheer audacity of the comment.
He and the other scavengers of SF's streets definitely had the last laugh that day though. With thousands of affluent racers going by, the entire course was littered with discarded or fallen clothing. Piles of sweatshirts, t-shirts, hats - even warm-up pants in every color, were piled on curbs, dropped in the road, or hung off of convenient roadside benches. It definitely occurred to me that the race is probably an excellent opportunity for increasing the warmth and bedding levels of the city's vagrants.
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