Before I begin retelling any tales, though, I believe it would be in storytelling's best interest to mention that it was Claudia's birthday today (on race day) and that she stayed with us Saturday night in order to make it to the start line on time on her big day.
I'm just going to go ahead and say this before anything else, fair warning. I will no longer be participating in races put on by Superhero Events, the company in charge of the Costume Party Run (CPR). I have already paid for the Awesome 80s Run in November, but Superhero will not be getting any more of my race dollars ever again.
I have already posted about the pricing issues I encountered for this race in another post, so I’m not going to rehash them here, but from Packet Pickup to the Finish Line, this entire race was the race that will make me a DNS-er forever with Superhero.
Last year, when the early bird pricing email came out for returning racers, we were explicitly told that three of our complaints would be addressed and fixed:
1.
No more trashy trucker hats. We would be getting tech
tees for 2014.
2.
A better route that didn’t include 4 miles of the
Qualcomm Stadium parking lot.
3.
Better route signage for all runners, particularly
those running the 5K and 10K routes.
Trusting that Superhero would make good on their written promise to us, TJ and I both signed up for a second year of
crazy costumes and July heat. We figured that we’d enjoy ourselves just as much
if not much more if Superhero made these small changes for us, so why not?Well, fast forward to earlier this year: CPR’s date is changed from July 7th to July 13th. That seems to be when this fiasco of a race began appearing disorganized to the public. Then came the pricing situation that was addressed previously. And then came the beginning of the end: Packet Pickup.
Packet Pickup was to be held from 2:00 – 6:00pm Saturday which to me still seems like a very short window to serve over 1,000 participants, but what am I to know? Maybe they were working some magic. So, I arrive early to Packet Pickup at 1:40pm and discover two things: one, there is absolutely no parking to be found and two, Packet Pickup for the first time ever is going to be threaded through the store and all participants are being filed into a 15’ by 25’ non-air conditioned room where the only exit is through the line of people stuck trying to get their bibs instead of the traditional method of having easy-up tents outside for participants to form individual lines based on bib numbers and easy escape. When I walked up and got in line, it was already starting to wrap around the building ten minutes before pickup. I won’t lie. I was worried. I had to be at SO’s house for his birthday dinner by 4:00. I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not.
As I queued up in line with my fellow runners, we began to pass our forty minute wait by chatting about past races and accomplishments. The man in front of me was really nice and introduced himself as Steve. I could tell by his shirt that he was an accomplished marathoner and we soon got to chatting about his running history, Half Fanatics, and Marathon Maniacs. Turns out Steve is a double agent! I knew he was a nice guy when we started chatting, but there’s something about the HF and MM groups that just instantly bonds you to other members of the Asylums.
Thirty minutes later, we entered the un-air conditioned furnace. It was awful, from the setup design to the race “swag” we received. The entire time I was stuck in that little room there was a woman behind one of the tables yelling at racers that we could just go to the table where our bibs were located if we knew our numbers, but the vast majority of people in line were stuck at numbers 1-600 because we were half marathoners. For twenty minutes, this woman belted out the same thing over and over and over to us in the sweltering heat of that room that we needed to move down to our numbers, despite the fact that we had moved as far as we could in the line as we could go to queue up for our bibs—and I was picking up three of them: mine, TJ’s, and Claudia’s. She was annoying and the room was hot, so when I saw race crew members giving out IDENTICAL trashy trucker hats as last year instead of the promised tech tees I was expecting, I was just miffed. And there were no volunteers that I saw. Every person I encountered in the furnace was a member of Superhero Events staff, so when I finally got up to the front of the line for bibs, I asked one of the staff members what happened. This is the response I got: “I’m sorry. That’s not my department, but I’ll pass it along to the race director for you.” When I told her that it didn’t matter because this was CPR’s last year in San Diego, she just kind of looked at me with a blank stare. Did she think I was naïve or was the heat getting to her? I don’t know, but I was ready to throw all three bibs and hats up in the air and just drive off by the time I managed to salmon my way back out of the building. Oh, and I made it to Ian’s birthday with seven minutes to spare. That’s how long the entire process took me from standing in line to getting our gear to trying to get out of the parking lot. (SO only lives twenty minutes away from Packet Pickup.)
So, after dinner, I head back home to meet one of my best running buddies in the entire world, Claudia. She came to the house and stayed with us overnight so that she could come to CPR and celebrate her birthday with us. She was absolutely instrumental in terms of helping TJ and I get our costumes ready, so I need to commend her for that, but Claudia is also just an incredible person with a huge heart. At this point, she’s family.
We went to bed
And then, we were actually able to find the Half Fanatics group for photos. Costumes, anyone?
The race itself was not-so-great. For the first six miles or so, Claudia and I were doing all right, but once the sun came out, the humidity and the heat just started to melt us, so we eneded up power walking the majority of the race. The course itself had six aid stations that ended up doubling to twelve in total since it was out-and-back. The first water station was a nightmare, though, and it took thirty seconds of me asking for water and barking volunteers telling racers not to touch anything on the tables for me to get a measly quarter cup of water. Trying to maneuver out of the lines was terrible also and I saw a number of racers having to shove through immobile participants so that they could keep going. And then about two miles out, a girl right in front of us started vomiting up Gatorade right near us. I felt bad for her, but there was nothing I could do. There were no Race Guards to be found like there were last year.
Claudia and I spent most of our race chatting, catching up, and comparing CPR 2014 to CPR 2013. There were definitely some changes made, but most of them weren’t really for the better. For one, they backed out of giving us the tech tees that we were promised. Then there was serious issues with the bathrooms. They were absolutely disgusting, so much so that I’m nauseated thinking about them over twelve hours later. Never in my life have I seen port-o-potties that bad. By the time we got to them, they were unusable and people had defecated all over the seats in most of them. It was just… It was just revolting. I don’t know what else to say. So, we had that to deal with and then as the race progressed, Claudia and I noticed that there were essentially no medics on the course. There were lots of medical stations set up, but nobody there to man them, so that girl who was having a rough time at Mile 2 may never have received medical if she needed it. That’s just scary to me after what happened at Safari Park this year. Things happen at races. Directors need to be prepared for that during the race, not just afterward in the Finishers’ Pavillion.
Back to our race, though: Claudia and I got to Mile 10 before we realized that we had no idea where the course was supposed to go, so after over a quarter mile of asking other racers and trying to scope things out, we decided to turn around and head back in toward the Finish area. Turns out that we ended up missing over a mile of the race because the course direction was so bad—another issue that Superhero was going to fix this year. It wasn’t until we met up with TJ and had gotten our medals did we realize just how much we had accidentally shaved off of the course. I felt really guilty about it at first, but who were we supposed to ask? Fellow racers only know so much and there were no race volunteers or staff members to be seen anywhere. It wasn’t our fault, so I’m taking my second CPR medal and wearing it proudly. They screwed up, not me. They also wouldn’t let TJ have any water after she initially passed on a cup to get her medal. When she came back they told her that she “could have Gatorade, but [they] were saving the water for the runners.” Seriously? Has TJ turned into a non-runner over the course of today? Because I’m pretty sure that she got a new PR today and improved her HM time by 3 minutes.
Despite the craziness of this race, though, and all its hang ups, everyone had a good time today and getting our medals was pretty awesome. Personally, I’m just glad to have this race done and over with—forever since it’s not coming back again. CPR has been an interesting experience and I’m glad to have shared it with some of the most incredible lady runners that I know, but I never need to deal with the chaos of this particular event or its parent company again. Would I like to find another non-October costume run in the future? Yes, but for now I’ll hang up my Bat-tutu and head to bed.
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