2009 Outer Banks Marathon

12. Outer Banks Marathon – Kitty Hawk, N.C. – Nov. 8, 2009

It had only been a month since Twin Cities, but I wanted to run one more marathon before the basketball season started, and a couple days at the ocean seemed like a great break a week before the first game.

I flew into Norfolk, Va., on Friday and jumped in a rental car for a two-hour drive to the Outer Banks. During the summer, the area is packed with vacationers, especially on the weekends, but in November it was pretty quiet. We rented a three-bedroom condo for less than $100 a night, which worked out great. In fact, it was far bigger than two of us needed. It was also about 200 yards from the starting line of an 8K on Saturday morning. The combination of the 8K on Saturday and the marathon on Sunday was called the Blackbeard Challenge, like a shorter version of the Goofy Challenge at the Disney Marathon. I figured I wasn’t going to go all out in the marathon anyway, so doing the challenge seemed like a fun idea. It was an out-and-back through the woods. I met a guy who was also doing the challenge, and we both were taking it easy during the run. He was from Oregon and told me stories about running against Steve Prefontaine in high school. It made for a very pleasant Saturday morning run.

Sunday’s marathon started on the north end of the island in Kitty Hawk and ran south through neighborhoods. There weren’t a lot of people lining the course, but the ones out there were friendly and supportive. Strangely, the entire course is within a mile of the Atlantic Ocean, but you can only see it a couple of times during the race. At Mile 8, the course goes by the Wright Brothers Monument, marking the site of the first flight in 1903. Right after, I spotted the condo we were staying in, but fortunately it was still early enough in the race that I had absolutely no desire to stop (a feeling I’ve had in other races, although I’ve never actually stopped).

The course changed to a hilly, dirt road about a mile later in the Nags Head Woods Nature Preserve, a stretch I had read about before the race but clearly surprised some of the other runners, including one guy that was running barefoot and less than pleased by the rocks he kept stepping on. In fact, this very section was on the previous day’s 8K. For runners going for a Boston qualifier or a PR, this part of the course could ruin their day. I was out to enjoy the race, and this section ended up being my favorite part of the course. It was shady, and they had done some maintenance on the dirt to make it more runner-friendly. Once you leave that park, the course goes almost immediately into Jockey’s Ridge State Park, which is the largest sand dune on the East Coast. The good news was that the course went next to the dune and not over it.

This was also the point in the race when I first noticed the bridge at the south end of the island. I knew that bridge was at Mile 23, so seeing it nearly 10 miles earlier was like a punch in the gut. I knew I was going to be staring at it the rest of the way. And those 10 miles were the ugliest on the course. We went through a few neighborhoods, which were fine, but most of it was along the main street of the island – your typical main drag in a beach town, complete with tacky T-shirt shops and tattoo parlors. And the entire stretch is completely exposed to the sun and car exhaust, since the road is only partially closed.

Finally, I reached the Washington-Baum Bridge, which hits a height of 82 feet and spans a mile. I have a general rule about not walking on uphills, which I find to be a great motivator. This one, however, became too much. Aside from the moderate hills in the nature preserve, the bridge represented the only hill on the course, but it’s so late in the race that I found it more challenging than Hurricane Point during Big Sur. I fought the fatigue of two marathons in a month and circled through the streets of Manteo to the finish line in 3:57.

The whole race had a pirate theme (hence the “Blackbeard Challenge”), and there were people dressed as pirates at the finish, posing with the runners for photos. I would have loved to stick around and enjoy the town, but my flight was later that afternoon, and I had to shower before checking out of the condo. We made our way to where the buses would pick us up and take us back to the starting area, where the car was parked. This was easily the worst part of the race. There were hundreds and hundreds of people waiting, and it seemed there weren’t a lot of buses running. Of course, when you have to drive the entire length of the 26.2-mile course on roads that were partially closed because of the race, it’s difficult to get buses back and forth between the start and finish. Eventually, we made it back to the condo and drove back to the Norfolk Airport (possibly setting some land-speed records in the process), making it just in time to fly home.