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Armadillo Dash Half Marathon

Okay, first of all, I did not come up with the name “Armadillo Dash.” If I had been asked, I would have come up with a name that included either (a) the name of the host cities you so could drum up some tourist recognition or (b) the distance being run so it didn’t sound like a giant roadkill roundup. But to each their own…

A little under a month after the Austin race, our local annual race was held here in Bryan-College Station. (Well, almost entirely in College Station, but I think we did run through a sliver of Bryan at the beginning.) As you can surmise, this one was quite a bit different from Austin for several reasons.

First of all, it was just a lot smaller. They only had a half marathon and a 5K, so there wasn’t the marathon contingent at all. That meant that when we got to starting line (marathons and half marathons generally start together, 5Ks start later), it was noticeably less crowded. Like 700 instead of 18,000 crowded.

That didn’t keep things from being a mess, though. The race started and ended at one of the big municipal athletic complexes on the edge of town. It was nice and big with plenty of parking, but it had one seriously fatal flaw – it only had two entry/exit points, one of which was closed down to serve as the start/finish line for the race. That meant there was a quite the traffic jam as people tried to pour in.

I left my house at 5:45 for what would normally be a five-minute drive and sat in traffic for over an hour. I ended up pulling into the parking lot at 6:57 and sprinting a quarter-mile from my car to the starting line for the 7 a.m. start. I made it with about twenty seconds to spare. That’s always the best way to start things off.

Second, the field was overwhelmingly local, so I actually knew a lot of the other people around me. Some of them I had seen at other races in the fall. Some of them were current or former coworkers. Others were people I’d just gotten to know one way or another in the time we’ve lived here. That was a marked contrast from Austin, where I knew absolutely no one.

And for some reason, I found it a little disconcerting. I felt like I was accountable to these people. If I screwed up in Austin, no one I knew would be there to see it. If I burst into flames or started babbling incoherently here though, it’d be water cooler talk by the time I got to work on Monday. Fortunately, I did neither.

Finally, the course was not nearly as nice as the one in Austin. Despite being out in the sticks (see below), they didn’t bother to shut down the roads. That meant we were all running along the shoulder or at most, a single lane and the shoulder. Even with 700 people, that’s just too darn close.

That was exacerbated by the fact that the shoulders hadn’t been cleaned, meaning there was the usual Texas assortment of gravel and debris on them. At points, I was literally jumping over tire shreds and other trash, or running in the ditch to avoid them and the other folks on the course. Good times.

Plus there were points when the course went over some county-maintained roads that could have used a little more maintaining. If you think potholes, wavy pavement and loose gravel are annoying in a car, trying running on them. There’s nothing worse than the prospect of twisting an ankle.

I’m not trying to sound like a race snob, but the fact of the matter was that it just felt very much like a “minor league race,” as opposed to an event. Which I guess is about right, given our community’s slot in the hierarchy of Texas cities.

They had an announcer at the finish line announcing each one of us by name as we crossed, which was pretty cool. And the post-race food was outstanding. It was put on by an all-volunteer staff, unlike many races which have at least a handful of full-time members, so really they did a pretty good job.

I’ll definitely be back next year, but mostly because it doesn’t involve travel. If it meant booking a hotel room, I’d probably skip it.

Fourthly (that’s not a word), I nearly forgot to mention another reason why this race was different. I ran a 5K the day before. Running a little warm-up jog the day before a race is one thing, but running in a competitive race is different, no matter the distance. I made it through both okay, but I was awfully sore by the end. I don’t know if I’ll be doing that again.