Walking in LA

As Missing Persons¹Yet another criminally underrated and now mostly forgotten new wave band tried to tell us more than 40 years ago, nobody walks in LA.

They did, though, carve out a few important exceptions: shopping cart pushers, freeway stranglers, roller skaters, people who run out of gas, and “lame jogger[s].” I guess I fall into that last category, because I did travel down there to run in the 2025 Rose Bowl Half Marathon this past weekend.²Which was technically in Pasadena, but I assume their intent was to encompass the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area.

This was my second time to participate in Pasadena’s second-largest annual street procession. Last year, I had COVID-19 on race day, although I didn’t know that until the symptoms started about two miles in. As you might imagine, not having a terrible respiratory ailment this time around made things infinitely better.

The 2025 race was originally scheduled for January but was postponed because of the terrible wildfires that devastated the area. That rescheduling resulted in a much smaller field of runners—a fact which allowed me to finish 2,212 places higher than I did last year.³Only finished a minute faster than 2024, so I guess COVID didn’t slow me down that much. Still, I’m chalking it up as a massive personal victory.

The Rose Bowl Half Marathon course is a mixed bag. Although it has some hills, they’re relatively minor by Bay Area standards, so I definitely appreciate that. The beginning and ending thirds of the course are spectacular as you go around park which surrounds the stadium. There’s a lot of greenery, beautiful bridges, and general low-key rich people neighborhood snobbery to take in.

Unfortunately, the middle portion of the race through downtown Pasadena is a bit of a slog. It’s almost entirely flat, but it does some weird back-and-out doglegs on side streets that feel rather pointless and make it hard to gauge where you’re at on the course. On the plus side, though, you get to go past the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and Caltech campus, and both of those are very nice to look at. And getting to run into the stadium and finish on the field makes it all worth it.⁴This is true whether it’s the 89,000-seat Rose Bowl or a tiny minor league stadium in Fresno. Running into any stadium at the end of a long race is a thrill.

About halfway through any race, you usually find a pack of people with a similar pace and end up running the remainder of the course with them. As we entered the stadium on Sunday morning, I discovered that the woman I had been yo-yoing back and forth with for the last five miles had jumped out to a big lead and, well, I took that personally.

Fueled solely by spite, I dug in my heels and blew past her in those last few hundred feet. It felt good. And it resulted in one of the most horrific/hilarious finish line photos of my running career. So another massive personal victory there as well.

You only see ’em drivin’ cars out on the street

Of course, I did end up doing a lot of driving because it’s impossible not to anytime you go to LA. They’ve got a lot of buses and an expanding subway system, but I just don’t see how anyone could survive there without a car.

According to the rental receipt, I put 225 miles on my little Buick Enclave in 24 hours. That was due in large part to the fact that I had to keep bouncing back and forth across the area due to the timing of things:

• From LAX to Pasadena to pick up my race packet before they closed.
• Then over to Westwood for an appointment to check out an apartment with The Son.
• Then over to Arcadia to check into my hotel room.
• Then over to Dodger Stadium for the game.
• Back to Westwood to drop off my kid, then back to hotel in Arcadia.
• Over to Pasadena and back for the race.
• Finally, back to LAX to drop off the car.

None of those places are near each other. That’s why nobody walks in LA.

A magical time at the airport

LAX isn’t one of my favorite airports. Although they’ve done some work recently, most of the gate areas are still way too small and the terminals are laid out very poorly. And don’t get me started on their lack of an inter-terminal train.⁵It’s truly inexplicable that one of the world’s major international airports expects passengers to schlep it through long, long underground tunnels to make their connections or reach a lounge in the year 2025.

Also, flights from LAX to San Francisco are almost always delayed because it’s a short flight and the easiest to hold when things are backed up at SFO.⁶Which is 99.99% of the time. When I have a connection on my way back home, I avoid LAX like the plague. Of course, I couldn’t do that this time since Los Angeles was my point of departure.

As I was walking into the terminal on Sunday, I heard shouting and the sounds of a fistfight breaking out. I assumed that it was a couple of passengers duking it out, but no—two of the skycaps at the United curbside baggage check kiosk were exchanging haymakers. A cop had to break it up. Not sure what it was all about, but it was certainly entertaining.

For once, my flight to SFO was not delayed, but it was overbooked because that’s somehow still seen as a legitimate business practice. Anyway, they were looking for volunteers to take a later flight in exchange for future travel credit and I, being an idiot, thought that sounded like an okay idea.

So I got six extra hours to spend at the airport, which I filled by checking out the egregious pricing at the newsstands, making the hour-long roundtrip sojurn to the AMEX Lounge over in the international terminal, and Facetiming with my dog.

When my later flight finally boarded, it was held at the gate for 45 minutes because of “something minor” with one of the wings. This less-than-reassuring announcement was made by the plane’s captain, who came out of the cockpit to use the flight attendant’s handheld microphone for some reason. He never came back to announce that the issue had been fixed, but the banging eventually stopped and the maintenance people drove away, so I guess they reached the point where they figured it was good enough.

Then we were held up because this flight had also been overbooked and somehow they had allowed more people to board than there were seats on the plane. After about 15 minutes of shuffling people around to different seats—which I didn’t understand because it didn’t alter the basic math of the situation—they finally kicked a few unfortunate souls off and got us into the air.

The wings didn’t fall off and everyone who remained aboard had somewhere to sit, but between all that and the curbside brawl earlier, it certainly wasn’t United’s finest day.

Last Friday at the ballpark

Before I left for Southern California, The Daughter and I caught the series opener between the Giants and Texas⁷Arlington Rangers. We also took advantage of the opportunity of cross something off our baseball fan bucket lists.⁸Not sure if The Daughter even has a bucket list, but she seemed excited about it.

Ever since I started attending games at Oracle⁹Pac Bell, SBC, AT&T, whatever Park, I’ve wanted to be the guy keeping track of Giants’ strikeouts on the right field wall. Now I’ve done it. I guess I can die happy.

I have to say, though, the whole thing was more stress-inducing than I anticipated. Nobody notices if you do it correctly, but if you screw it up then all of a sudden you have thousands of people silently judging you. We both became keenly aware of the possibility of abject failure and public humiliation as the time to change our signs approached.

Those wooden signs are pretty heavy, and leaning over the railing doesn’t provide the greatest angle for leveraging one’s upper-body strength. There’s a non-zero chance of hurting someone sitting below if you drop one of them. Fortunately, we practiced a bit before the game started and made it through the evening with zero errors.

A couple of youngsters next to us handled the duties for the first two strikeouts, but then my time to shine came in bottom of the second when Justin Verlander punched out Dustin Harris. Then, after a few close calls, The Daughter got her chance to hang a backwards K in the middle of the fifth inning when Verlander slipped a changeup past Jake Burger¹⁰Sorry, I workshopped several hamburger-related puns, but couldn’t land on one that I really liked. for his fourth strikeout of the evening.

The older gentleman to the left of us took care of K number five and then split. I guess he had other things to do. The other guy at the far end of the row was too engrossed with videos on his phone to pay attention to the game,¹¹Why even bother paying for a ticket? Save money and watch YouTube at home. so we also took care of strikeouts 6–10. I wanted to get a picture documenting our work, but a team of ushers swooped in as soon as the last out was recorded to remove all the signs.

The game itself was a snoozer. The Rangers eked out a pair of runs, the Giants managed none, and another decent Verlander start was wasted. There can’t be too many of those left in the tank, so it would be nice if they could cash one of them in for a win once in a while.

Last Saturday at another ballpark

I really had planned on Friday night being the only game I’d attend over the weekend, but then The Son suggested that we catch a game while was in town. Since I’m incapable of passing up an opportunity to watch a baseball game, we soon found ourselves sitting high above Chavez Ravine.

Even though were a million feet up in the top deck, our seats were dead center in the second row, so the view was not too shabby. Honestly, I’d rather always be up high with a view of the entire field than sit down closer but with a limited view.

This game was far more entertaining. The Pirates led things off with a home run off the very first pitch and both teams battled back and forth to keep things close until the eighth inning when the Dodgers batted around the order and cashed in a pair of homers from the Hernández brothers, Teoscar and Enrique,¹²No, they’re not actually brothers. to blow the thing wide open.

Off the field, I tried the Dodgers’ “dill pickle” tater tots, which seemed to be just regular tater tots that were stored in the general vicinity of a sealed jar of pickles or something. Despite the flecks of green, I detected zero dill flavoring. Going to call those a swing and a miss.

It was also Dave Roberts bobblehead night, so now I have a random Dodger bobblehead mixed in with my collection of Giants/Athletics/Astros ones. That’s fine though – I love all my bobbleheads equally.¹³Although I might secretly love my Joc Pederson Indiana Jones with the spinning baseball boulder one the most.

Afterwards, we spent an hour waiting to get out of the parking lot, thus completing the Dodger Stadium experience. Nobody may walk in LA, but it would probably be faster sometimes if they did.

• 1
  Yet another criminally underrated and now mostly forgotten new wave band
• 2
  Which was technically in Pasadena, but I assume their intent was to encompass the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area.
• 3
  Only finished a minute faster than 2024, so I guess COVID didn’t slow me down that much.
• 4
  This is true whether it’s the 89,000-seat Rose Bowl or a tiny minor league stadium in Fresno. Running into any stadium at the end of a long race is a thrill.
• 5
  It’s truly inexplicable that one of the world’s major international airports expects passengers to schlep it through long, long underground tunnels to make their connections or reach a lounge in the year 2025.
• 6
  Which is 99.99% of the time.
• 7
  Arlington
• 8
  Not sure if The Daughter even has a bucket list, but she seemed excited about it.
• 9
  Pac Bell, SBC, AT&T, whatever
• 10
  Sorry, I workshopped several hamburger-related puns, but couldn’t land on one that I really liked.
• 11
  Why even bother paying for a ticket? Save money and watch YouTube at home.
• 12
  No, they’re not actually brothers.
• 13
  Although I might secretly love my Joc Pederson Indiana Jones with the spinning baseball boulder one the most.