LITTLE ROCK — Anybody who was planning to sign up for the Little Rock Marathon or its half-marathon can forget that for this year. The 13.1-mile race filled up Tuesday (reaching 3,700 racers), and the marathon accepted its 2100th racer Thursday.
But you could still do the relay marathon - which is, ahem!, a marathon’s relay. Geneva Hampton, one of the two marathon organizers employed by the city, said the relay will accept 250 teams (of four racers each). Tuesday she still had 50 openings left for teams.
So that’s an option still open for you ... assuming you’re trained to walk or run about 7 miles and can scare up three other people equally able to perambulate the other legs.
Whichever teammate takes the first bit would have to swallow pride and line up behind the elite fleet folks, because the first two starting-line corrals will be packed by human whippets. You’d face interference from slowpokes who are planning to race the entire 26.2-mile course and so are moving slowly to shepherd their resources, but eventually you could edge around and past them.
Sure you could. And it’s a chiptimed event. Your personal race clock doesn’t begin clicking until you cross the starting line, no matter how many hundreds of other people start in front of you.
Or here’s another option that’s still open: All by yourself, you could enter the 5K footrace that’s also part of Little Rock Marathon weekend, March 5-6. Hampton said that 3.1-mile race has room for 400 more bodies.
Online and mail-in registration for all these races ends at midnight Friday. After Friday, people will have to register at the Health & Fitness Expo on March 4-5.
For future reference pertaining to all half-marathons, everywhere: The distance is wildly popular. When you see one you like, take it.
Kumbaya
The Little Rock Marathon training team will meet in street clothes one last time to talk through wise strategies for race day.
Free and open to anyone training for Little Rock’s several events, the meeting will begin at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Crowne Plaza Little Rock, 201 S. Shackleford Road.
Coaches Tom and Hobbit Singleton will offer advice about what to expect and how not to react. The Singletons lead the city’s free group training program, which draws a mighty crowd of bleary-eyed people onto streets in central Arkansas for Saturday morning workouts - not only during the four-month official buildup to the race but all year.
More information is at littlerockmarathon.com.
Medal mettle
Blinding snow Feb. 4 forced Little Rock Parks and Recreation to cancel a press conference at which it planned to unveil this year’s marathon medal. But Director Truman Tolefree and the race co-planners, Hampton and Gina Pharis, videotaped a little tada. You can find the video clip on YouTube by looking under “Little Rock Marathon.”
Tolefree says a few words, and Pharis credits Hampton with the medal design. The women then lift what appears to be the cuirass of a gladiator costume to reveal the medal and its rather fancy cream colored ribbon.
Since 2004, when Runner’s World magazine weighed race medals and declared Little Rock’s the world’s largest, Parks and Recreation has invested in holding that title, which is a marketing tool of considerable appeal among marathon tourists, who rove the planet seeking such things as though rooting out truffles.
The 2011 marathon finisher’s medal is 7 3/4 inches long and 5 inches wide and weighs 1 1/2 pounds - slightly less than last year’s, which weighed 1.67 pounds. A similar-looking but lighter weight half marathon finisher’s medal is 3 3/4 inches long by 2 1/2 inches wide.
Each consists of a spinning disk depicting the globe, its deep blue sea striped by lines of latitude and meridians of longitude. The land masses of the Western Hemisphere are lurid green, and Little Rock’s pricked out on our continent by a star.
A serrated bronze-tone halo encircles the disk, bearing the race name and date as well as a red “smooch,” which represents a kiss from Hampton and Pharis. Below that border there’s a red flourish representing ribbon, and below that crouches a figure that some (tediously literal) people will interpret as a speed skater or the Silver Surfer.
But no, Hampton explains, this “Greek-esque figure” is Atlas, the Titan who in ancient myth carried the sphere of the heavens on his shoulders. The world was flat back then, but the heavens were some kind of ball. I know it doesn’t make sense now, but we’re talking about ideas held by ancients. Ancients are different from you and me.
This modern Atlas bears the planet plus that be-smooched and serrated circlet, and he’s trying to run, too.
What’s with the Greek-esque stuff? This year’s marathon theme is “A Race of Mythic Proportions.”
“We may wrap everybody in togas when they finish,” Hampton says.
Kettlebells
Life Warrior Fitness is a new boot-camp exercise business in Little Rock specializing in kettlebell training. Owner Brad Hamilton is offering an introduction to his programs at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Cantrell Road/Cedar Hill Road section of Little Rock’s Allsopp Park.
This sample class is a benefit for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas, with the price of admission being one article of children’s clothing (not a winter coat). Otherwise, the class is free.
Registration, which is required so he’ll bring enough gear, is available at LittleRockKettlebellBootCamp.com. Or you can call (501) 350-9381.
Hamilton is a certified Russian Kettlebell Challenge instructor.
ActiveStyle, Pages 24 on 02/21/2011