While the flight itself from Chicago to Boston was uneventful, I had occasion to overhear a lady one row up from me and on the other side of the aisle talking with her seatmate. And as she was telling her tale, I began to boil, knowing that venting there was pointless -- so I'm doing so here.
At first, her tale started simply. For some reason, she didn't bother telling any of her friends (who were going to be at the Boston Marathon cheering on the racers, as far as I could gather) that she was going to be running the marathon. She was keeping it a secret from them. Not sure why -- I didn't catch that. After all, they knew that she was running the Chicago Marathon -- why not tell them she's doing the double? But she didn't. Fine, whatever.
But then she gets into talking about the logistics of doing both marathons on consecutive days and how she thought it was silly to go through those hoops. (Excuse me? Given the requirements of both races, you HAD to jump through those hoops, just like I did, to manage both races.) No, she worked her way around the system. She talked about how she had one of her friends pick up her bib (using her ID (and presumably a copy of her COVID vaccination card) -- so, clearly that friend knew the racing plan, but was "sworn to secrecy"). And how her friend made sure that the wristband that was put onto her wrist was loose enough -- so that after she picked up the bib, she could slip the wristband off.
If I heard correctly, she paid this friend about $60 to do this for her. I was a little unclear about the connection to the BAA, if this friend was actually a member or not. But this lady talked about how she had asked about getting the bib and wristband sent to her, or some other way of getting it, to no avail. Hence why she resorted to this method of (in my words) scamming the system.
Yes, this lady legitimately registered for the race and had a legitimate bib. She wasn't going to be running with someone else's bib or a faked one. However, it grinds my gears (thanks, Peter Griffin) that she worked her way around this system. A system that is put in place for good reasons.
I have no idea what her name is, what her expected starting timeframe was, nor if she even finished. But, in my book, she should have been a DNS (Did Not Start, for the uninitiated reading along), since she never got the wristband and bib in the prescribed manner while the expo was open.
By some accounts, there were about 200 of us who did this double. If the rest of us could figure out the way to handle the logistics, she could and SHOULD have done so, too.
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