Air Force Half Marathon
Dayton, Ohio
Saturday, September 18, 2010

I race walked the Air Force Half Marathon on Saturday, September 18, 2010 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The hardest part of the event was getting my car parked and walking the ¾ mile to the start line.. The event literature stated that I should arrive at least 1.5 hours before my event. I arrived 2.5 hours and spent almost 1 hour getting from where the vehicles were backed up to where I parked my car. I still had to walk to the start. They were using 3 separate gates and were not doing security checks as the parking and start were on an inactive part of the base property where the Air Force Museum is located. There was plenty of space to park the 10000 participants. There were not enough people directing the cars, coupled with a very obvious lack of knowledge of how to park a massive amount of vehicles. Perhaps the Air Force needs to contact Disney!!!! It was a nightmare for the marathon participants as I watched several hundred runners cross the start line as much as 15 minutes after the main field left the start line. I do not know how many half marathoners started late as I did manage to start with the main field. The race itself was very well organized. The starting guns went off at the scheduled times. The marathoners were greeted by a B-52 doing 5 fly bys and the half marathoners were greeted by two fighter jets doing three fly bys. The half marathon course was about 50% flat and 50% medium difficulty hills. Water/Gatorade stations were located approximately every 1.5 miles and were manned by plenty of enthusiastic volunteers. Since the course was almost entirely run on the active part of the base, there were very few spectators except at the start and finish line due to security issues. There were plenty military personnel along the course to insure that the participants stayed on course and keeping the base secure. The finish was a through a corridor of vintage aircraft at the Air Force Museum, which was quite impressive. I enjoyed the race itself. The post race food was also good and the finisher’s medal was top notch. However, retrieving my bag at the bag check was another nightmare due to poor organization. The prerace exposition was at the Nutter Center which is Wright State’s Basketball Arena. It was too small for such a big event and the organization for picking up packets was not up to the usual standards for big events as only a narrow corridor outside the stands was used for both the vendors’ booths and a single line that led to a set of tables on the side where each participant went to one of 15-20 volunteers who had to discover who the participant was then look in a set of boxes to find the participant’s bib number. Next each participant walked down from near the top of the arena to the basketball floor to pick up his goody bag and nice technical shirt, returning back up the steps to exit the arena. Amby Burfoot of Runner’s World and former Olympian, Bill Rogers were part of a speaker panel at the exposition which was also located on the basketball floor next to the goody bag pick up. I did not stay to listen to them as I figured that the noise in the arena from the goody pick up would make hearing the speakers difficult. I was very surprised to find so much disorganization associated with an event hosted by the US Air Force. On Sunday I toured the Air Force Museum. It is one of the best museums I have ever toured and I have been in the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC. Overall I had a nice trip.