Las Vegas Rock & Roll Marathon and Half Marathon 2011

Where have you all been?  I have had a lot to say!   You missed it!  And now you’ll never know what it was all about.  

But today, I want to talk about the Las Vegas Rock & Roll Marathon and Half Marathon held this year on December 4, 2011.  Matt & I have participated in the half marathon for the last two years.  We were going to take a pass on it this year, but then it was decided that they were going to turn it into a night run, and well, we just had to do it. We had to be a part of history.  We were amongst the very first to sign up and were pretty excited about it for most of the year.  After all, Vegas is one of our very favorite places for some strange reason, considering that we don’t drink, go to nightclubs, gamble away a lot of money or spend a fortune in expensive stores.

Originally, we were going to stay at NY NY.  But then we received a friendly e-mail from the Wynn inviting us to stay there offering us some very too-g00d-to-pass-up-rates and a shuttle to/from the race start/finish and some other amenities.  We thought this was a great opportunity to stay there.  It was awesome.  We actually stayed at the Encore, and a full review will be upcoming (as well as some other Vegas hotel reviews).

Fast forward to race day.  I woke up at 5:00 a.m.  and went back to bed smiling.  The thing I hate the most about races is that early rising time.  I hate getting up at 3:00 a.m. to run a race.  I understand why races start so early.  I always thought it would be better if they started at 11:00 though.  But, that is just me.  And maybe, my friend Vicki.  Eventually, though, Matt and I did get up and we knew that there was a balance to follow between eating and not eating.   Same with movement.  We had a good breakfast, a good lunch, a little walking and resting in between.

We had planned to be on the shuttle at 4:00, for the race start at 5:30.  But as we headed to the lobby to the shuttle, we find a very long line  which doesn’t appear to be moving.  At all.  Long story  short – we get on the bus at 4:55.  The bus driver tells us that it will take an hour to get to the start.  Yikes!  I didn’t believe him.  As someone prone to exaggeration, I tend to think everyone is.  Well, he was right on.  There was so much traffic.  I guess the residents of Las Vegas didn’t get the memo about the Boulevard being closed.  Sigh.

Big races like this usually use a corral system for starting.  The faster runners start in an earlier corral and slower runners and walkers are to the back.  Matt was in corral 18 and I was in 33.  According to the booklet sent home with us at the expo, I was to start at 6:25.  We got to the start line at 6:05.  There were no corrals.  It was just a mass exodus to the start.  Matt and I were not able to gear check his warm clothes (it was to be going down to the 30s by the time the race was over), so I had to carry them with me and we were not able to use a porta potty.  In fact, the bus couldn’t even get us to the start line.  He dropped us off somewhere close by and said that it would be quicker for us to walk to the start.  When we got there, organizers were tearing up the start line and looked at us with disdain and said “Hurry it up, and get moving”.  Oh, like we are late on purpose.

I don’t know what they did with the literally hundreds of people that were still behind us waiting for busses at the Encore and Wynn and Venetian etc!  They were even later!

At this point, all we could do is … go.  It was already cold out.  Not unbearably so, but getting there.  I was warm, and I had a hat and gloves in my pocket.  I had planned to do a lot of running intervals in the beginning for about the first half and then walk totally the second half.  I wasn’t trained for much more than five miles of intervals, but at races, we can go further than we have trained for.  The cold slowed me down and having to use the bathroom made it worse.  I couldn’t run if I wanted to.  The cold made me stiff and it hurt to run.  I really needed that porta potty!

So, we are TRYING to go.  Really.  But here is the biggest problem  - Too. Damn. Crowded.  No room to move.  Couldn’t run. Couldn’t walk.  Everyone shoved in like sardines.

First water station – a little past the first mile.  It’s not even 6:25.  Not even an hour after the start of the half marathon.  This was MY ORIGINAL SCHEDULED STARTING TIME.  They had already started shutting it down.  Yes, we were all like “What? No water?”  Then we notice a little further up, water on the left side.  So we go over to the left and get some.   This was a pattern for the whole race.  Everything was on the left.  The water stations. The porta-potties.  Towards the end, there were some water tables on the right, finally.

Somewhere around mile 3, I hear “Please move aside.  Marathoners are coming through.  Please move.  We’ve already gone 15 miles” and stuff like that.  He sounded really rude. I was kind of taken aback.  I was on the right side anyway, so he wasn’t talking to me.  It was about mile 8 when I noticed that there were cones separating the lanes.  Little tiny cones.  Yeah, like we could see that.  How about putting water stations and porta potties on our side then?  Maybe we wouldn’t have to migrate over there?

All the lines to the potties were a mile long.  Eventually, around mile 5, I gave up looking for a short line and found one behind a band station. It was pretty demoralizing to watch the mass of people go swarming by.   I find out later that it was a band use toilet, but they still let us all use it. Thankfully.  When I left, I knew that I had time to make up and I did some running intervals.  I was freezing at this point, and my asthma threatened to kill me, but I put on my hat and went for it.

The crowd never ever lightened up.  The closest I got to a celebrity was seeing a Biggest Loser semi-finalist from season 3, who was running for the Colitis Foundation.  It just kept getting colder and colder.  I keptwalking faster and faster. I would find a person in front of me and catch up to them and then find another target and just keep doing that until I got to the finish.  The icing on the cake was the rain that fell during the last mile.  The sprinkles on top was that they ran out of half marathonmedals and I got a full marathon medal!  It was prettier but I didn’t earn it!

I finished in something like 3:39.  You can easily take 20 minutes of that off for my standing in line to use a toilet and that makes it 3:20 which seems about right.  This was definitely the worst race ever.  The most poorly run race ever by an experienced racing group.

Me at the finish line, with my green banana (it was ripe by Wednesday), marathon medal, very glad to be done and not be inside the madhouse, er, Mandalay Bay.

Physically, I was fine, I am fitter and lighter this year than last year.   I didn’t get sick like last year, although many did get sick.

I am going to list the complaints, mine or others’ that have shown up on facebook below:

*Expo:  Overcrowded.  I’m used to this and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary except for the Zappos area.  However, while we were there, we were given apologies and told they would have that fixed for next year.

*Illnesses:  Apparently hundreds got sick.  Not us.  Water was blamed.  Southern Nevada Health Department has tested the water and it has come back clean.  I suspect that it was due to the fact that it was a night race and people are not used to running at night. I literally saw hundreds of pieces of discarded clothing on the side of the road.  I thought people were being short sighted there.  I think these people were sick from hypothermia.  I also can’t tell you how many people I heard saying that they didn’t eat anything or hardly anything all day, thinking they couldn’t.  Just because you don’t eat before running a morning race (when do you have time when you wake up at 3:00 a.m. for a 5:00 race?  who can eat when you are still asleep?)  It is totally different at night!  It wasn’t the water!  I also suspect that there might have been some alcohol consumption going on.  In Vegas?  No, you say?

*Walkers:  Too many walkers.  I don’t think there were too many walkers.  I think the walkers were pushed to the front because of the late shuttle busses and the dismantling of the corrals, and people were more aware of them.   And I think a lot of people who walk/run were forced to walk a lot more than they would normally have because they had no choice due to the crowded conditions.  I have never heard so many rude things said about walkers at races as I did on the Competitor Group’s facebook event wall after the race.

*This race was awesome last year.  At 30,000 participants. This year, 45,000 participants were way too many.

*Apparently (I didn’t see this part) Mandalay Bay was a mess.  Gear check was inside Mandalay Bay and it was a dangerous situation with all the people.  They allowed the racers only in a certain part of the hotel.  Everyone was squished.  The medics were in there too.  People were being trampled trying to get warm, get to a bathroom, get medical attention/food, get to the tram, their gear.  Andboth before and after the race, the Michael Jackson show was letting in/out and I experienced that later in the week and that was its own kind of madhouse.  So glad we didn’t need to get in there.

*Shuttle busses – lots of people said that there were no shuttles at the end of the race.  There were. And they were clearly marked.  We had no trouble finding them.  I think the issue was when people went into Mandalay Bay never to return, when they came out , they ended up on some side street somewhere and couldn’t figure out where they were.  Gear check should have been outside

*Medals – again.  How the heck do you run out of these?  Oh, you let people take more than one?  You let people who didn’t participate take them?  That’s the rumors that I heard!  Competitor group has apologized and is making good on getting medals out to those who didn’t get them.  I e-mailed them and have heard back and I will be getting a new one.

*T-shirts –  they ran out of these too.  Apparently all the women are the size of 11 year olds cause they are tiny sized.  I have mine and it’s teeny tiny.  I should fit an XL.  There were no Half Marathon finisher shirts at the expo either.  I don’t know if they weren’t printed or if they were sold out.  Considering how early we were there on Saturday though, I would hope it was that they just didn’t print any, because that means they printed about 500 otherwise which is even stupider than not printing them at all.

At this point, that is all I can remember.

I am going to add three links below, two other blogs and a newspaper article below.  Wordpress doesn’t really link, so you’ll have to copy and press.  I particularly like the one that gives the perspective of the runner from the front of the pack who didn’t see all of the problems.

Thank you for reading this very long post!  :)

http://runitfast.com/2011/12/05/the-nightmare-on-the-strip-rock-n-roll-las-vegas-marathon-half-marathon-full-of-sin/

http://runforfun-stephanie.blogspot.com/2011/12/vegas-tale-of-two-races.html

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/dec/08/marathon/