I love the American spirit. We're unique. What other nation celebrates Independence with such a wide array of opportunities to injure or kill yourself? On July 4th we gather in drunken groups to blow fingers off with fireworks or set fire to ourselves via grills.
In Atlanta, the hurting starts early with the Peachtree Road Race. 55,000 official entrants, plus an unknown number of unofficial "stringers" run, walk, and crawl 6.2 miles down Peachtree in the Summer heat. If you have never seen the Peachtree, it's quite a spectacle. The logistical arrangement is fascinating. Getting 55,000 people to run together is clearly an accomplishment close to putting a man on the moon.
The runners don't all start at the same time, they're divided into time groups. The elite runners start first, and every few minutes thereafter another wave moves up to the start line and begins at their own time. Since runners are by definition anxious to get moving, the time groups are seperated with the clarity of Indian castes. They're herded into enormous enclosures I call "holding pens". Volunteers direct runners by bib number (for example, runners with numbers starting with 7 are in that time group) to where to wait for the start of the race. You can drop back and start in a later time group if you want to run with a friend or get a few extra minutes of sleep. Trying to sneak into a higher time group is about as easy as infiltrating Al Queda.
Each holding pen (composed of chain link fences and orange netting) is self-contained, with it's own water station, porta-potties, and volunteer cadre. For about two hours, it's like a little mini-city of 5,000 along Peachtree street. To move runners to the starting line, the volunteers remove the netting from the front of the pen. Several of them take up positions at the front with signs marked on the front with "WALK" and "STOP" on the back. By flipping these signs back and forth, they can control the movement of the group without the dreaded "pileup" effect, when the back of a large group keeps moving when the front has stopped. All in all, it's a very organized and well-run process. It helps that many of the volunteer groups are composed of the same people who work the same station each year, so they have preassigned jobs that are old hat.
The pain of the Peachtree road race can be measured in numbers. According to the Atlanta Track club runners will collectively burn 34 million calories. 120,000 gallons of water is used in a futile attempt to keep runners cool during the race. It's distributed in 65,00 bottles and 500,000 paper cups for drinking, and for cooling by spray hoses. Even Jesus tries to keep everyone from stroking out on the race course.
Of course, only 54, 950 runners are really hurting. About 50 world class African runners drop in and leave Americans in the dust. They collect their T-shirts and depart Hartsfield International before time group 9 even gets to the starting line.
