Early morning wake up call

Living in the city has its set of issues. Even in a place like Wilmington, best known for being the place your credit card bills go to, you never quite know what will wake your peaceful slumber on a Sunday morning. Such as, I don’t know, a random cannon blast.

In a sign of just how unobservant I can be in life I completely missed the notification that the Delaware marathon was going to start and finish directly outside of my apartment. Now in some ways this is rather cool. If I had decided to run in the marathon I would have been able to sleep in my own bed the night before, have a leisurely breakfast in my own kitchen and walk to the starting line. No worrying about parking or the like. But given that my medical staff has told me that they would hit me in the head with a two by four prior to allowing me to run a marathon those rules did not apply to me.

Instead I was pleasantly asleep at 6:15 in the morning when I began to hear loud music as the runners began to line up. I did not want to wake up that early and in no way felt that Kool and the Gang was what I needed to hear at that hour. I stayed in bed as I listened to the instructions and the national anthem as the race neared its beginning. And to mark the opening of the marathon (which only had about 600 runners) they shot off a freaking cannon.

I’m not making this up. The entire apartment building shook. You could feel the concussive blast against the building. I assume that every single person in the building who wasn’t woken up by the music was roused out of bed by the shelling. This happened twice as both the half marathon and the relay marathon also were started in a rather bombastic fashion.

I was so happy when it started pouring rain on the runners. Serves them right for waking me up.

I have friends who run marathons and I really would like to get in shape and try (though I think I have too much of an injury history to really do it) but if given a choice I don’t think Delaware is the best place to run a marathon. First off, I thought that one of the reasons you run in the big city marathons is the huge crowd so that you have constant encouragement. Here you could be really on your own. Plus, downtown Wilmington is not exactly the most beautiful of locations. I’d want to run the London marathon, which would be just amazing to do and starts and ends at Buckingham Palace. But I can’t see this race being incredibly exciting.

I just hope that next year they decide to be a little quieter at the start.

Best of 120 Minutes: I’m in a bit of a mellow mood at the moment so here is some Cowboy Junkies to start the week.

Cowboy Junkies MTV Music

The five random CDs for the week:
1) Tift Merritt “Bramble Rose”
2) Jack Ingram “Hey You”
3) The Frames “The Roads Outgrown”
4) Maggie Walters “Maggie Walters”
5) Lucinda Williams “Essence”