Meet the CIGNA 5K, another "big" event cut almost in half by the coronavirus circus

Greater freedom to choose has been chipping away at the field sizes of large, established events for years, but Fauci et al. added a kick in the balls for good measure

Until two weeks ago, I had not been stung by a bee for nearly three decades and had avoided being pierced by other types of flying insects with biological bayonets strapped to their asses for a solid twenty years.

I was semi-regularly punctured by wasps as a kid, because the fuckers would construct mammoth domiciles undetected under the eaves of my family’s modern log-cabin home, in which I enjoyed the only second-floor bedroom. At some point I became old and wise enough to scale the house in both directions between the (soft) ground and my bedroom window and sometimes the roof. (Not one American boy in history has never tried to climb to the top of his house for a better view, especially a giant Lincoln Log structure with de facto ladders at the corners.) My enjoyment of these adventures—often already pockmarked even on a good day by ungraceful multi-point landings—was further tempered by my being regularly stung by one or more wasps in frantic transit. I began to wish that wasps were actually larger, dangerously large, so that it would be possible to line one up and punch it square in its gruesome face with exoskeleton-shattering force.

I also recall being stung by a ground hornet on a Christmas-tree farm in the mountains of North Carolina in 2002, not long before I saw a bale of hay catch fire thanks to what appeared to be nothing more than overly persistent August sunlight (maybe I chose the wrong time of year to visit this kind of agricultural venture). But I have to go back to 1995, when I was playing a monumentally watered-down version of a newly commissioned Army officer at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, to verify an honest-to-goodness bee sting. I remember this because I had only been stung by such a creature once before, and the second time around is when susceptible people usually have their first serious anaphylactic reaction (the first merely primes their mast cells to dump unreasonable amounts of histamine and other shit into their bloodstreams upon encountering the dreaded antigen in bee venom). When I did not experience anything besides sudden pain and considerable annoyance, I confirmed that I was not allergic.

Earlier this month, I was walking a familiar dog on familiar streets, but covering ground at a far slower pace than I do when running along the same streets. After I felt sudden jabbing-ripping sensation on my left shoulder—like bad dental work to the deltoid, for lack of a remotely accurate comparison—I looked down to see a rapidly dying bee on the ground.

“Motherfucker,” I announced to Barclay, the small dog now sniffing at the moribund insect, which had only been doing the only thing it could do when it did it. I could have stomped on this one to terminate its misery, but insects lack the neural machinery to perceive what humans call pain, so fuck them anyway.

The only consequence was a small welt. Maybe that’s why, last Tuesday or Wednesday, I was stung again in almost the same spot (this time, the aggressor managed to hit my tricep, which is not easy these days even with pheromone-honed aim).

When such a chain of events occurs, a reasonable person immediately concludes that God is sending him a message. Nearly three decades of being ignored by bees and then two signals from the same tiny slice of roving nature? Not a coincidence. And since the Bible is laden with calls for disproportionate vengeance, I have begun devising strategies to minimize the chances of this happening to anyone else again.

I started late last week by scanning the neighborhood for bees and spraying them with Raid as well as flattening them with rolled-up newspapers (no technology has made gains on this essential weapon). I killed maybe two hundred bees before it dawned on me that my concept of rationality had been skewed by religion. By foolishly directing my fury at bees, I was addressing the symptom, not the cause. And so I have since redirected my efforts to running with a trowel starting at around midnight and uprooting the most garish flowerbeds I can see.

The town is loaded with them at this time of year, and I can see I have a lot of work ahead of me. But the Book of Job reminds me of the value of blind, masochistic persistence in the service of a properly conjured mentor.

I also have a new tick bite, if not the tick responsible, on my right upper back the upper right part of my back (I have only one back). But the main idea of this post is the CIGNA 5K, held almost annually on the second Thursday of August in Manchester, New Hampshire since 1995.

I lived 20 minutes north in Concord until 2002 and ran this race—by far the state’s largest—a number of times, the first in 1996. Although I placed 10th in both 1996 and 1997, I prefer to focus on the more recent of these, in part because it was my fastest CIGNA run but more importantly because that race was exactly twenty-five years ago; when connecting current events to personal historical ones, my brain is maximally soothed by working with conventional, round time frames. I know at least one regular reader who can empathize with this. Also, notice the name of the 74th-place finisher.

I live 2,000 miles from Manchester now, but this year’s CIGNA 5K, the first since 2019, is salient because two family members ran it. I’m still often stuck in the mode of being the only person in my family to take up distance running and stick with it, an observation that hasn’t been true in close to fifteen years. But not only did both members of this father-son pair run the race, each of them also placed third in his age group. My nephew Hayden, who will soon start his sophomore year at Colby-Sawyer College, took 16th overall in 17:26, while my brother-in-law Mike—forced into excessive training this summer with his rapidly improving son at home—was 68th in 19:41.

Mike is not only a natty dresser, but he’s also fundamentally a meathead (weight-lifter) and trains like one, although wisely, almost never varying from 7:30 pace. Smart weight-lifters often make smart runners because they are cognizant of their limits at extremes of effort rather than trying to rip through them, fratboy-style.

But Hayden is a college athlete. His times may be modest, but this is a kid who only sixteen months ago held 800m and 1,600m personal bests of 2:23 and 5:35 despite running track and cross-country from the spring of his sophomore year onward. Despite this in theory not heralding a shot at competitive collegiate running, Hayden clung to “the bug” and happened upon a perfect situation at Colby-Sawyer. He was very competitive in his own conference as a freshman, running 2:07 for 800m and a team-leading 4:28 for 1,500m (about 4:48 for 1,600m). One of his coaches is among my most trusted and supportive longtime friends.

People hold a mistaken belief that distance runners can flourish even in the presence of ignorant or negligent coaching, because talent always finds a way in this sport. That may be true of most of the most talented kids, whose stunted development is still objectively impressive on racecourses. But if you’re a kid who loves running despite being a soft-spoken late bloomer but isn’t naturally gifted, you’re mostly on your own, other than the Internet and, if you’re lucky, a burned-out uncle living in the faraway mountains and whispering private encouragement between public rants that flirt with laptop-battering meltdowns.

Hayden held on for long enough to find two excellent coaches, and his interest has had ripple effects throughout my family. My mom is one of those past track mothers who picked up a lot more about the sport than she ever wanted to, and Hayden’s exploits are offering her something of a renaissance. She was among the several people who sent me the 2022 CIGNA results on Thursday night before I’d even thought to look them up.

The CIGNA course has been altered slightly over the years, with the effect of locating a short, pain-in-the-ass hill about a half-mile from the finish line instead of right before the three-mile mark. It’s not a fast course; the first 2K are gradually uphill, the next mile is gradually downhill, and the last mile is flat or slightly downhill until the pain-in-the-ass rise before a flat finish. But it’s still the site of the all-comers state record (13:53), set in 2009 by Alene Reta. (Lynn Jennings holds the women’s all-comers’ record, 15:28, which she ran at a now-defunct Concord race in 1993; as a bonus, Jennings lived in New Hampshire at the time.)

The overall level of participation rose to around 5,000 early in the event’s inception, and despite a gradual decline over the previous decade, the 2019 event had 4,276 finishers. This year there were only 2,287. This is part of a clear pattern, with the fields of the 2022 editions of the Broad Street Run in Philadelphia and the Bolder Boulder falling to a little over half of their 2019 sizes.

It’s hard to feel sorry for a flailing race when the race is sponsored by any type of insurance company. But countless small businesses suffered similar needless hits thanks to coronavirus-driven restrictions that not only look excessive now, but looked ludicrous in real time. And even though these have been lifted virtually everywhere besides the purulent boil called New York City, their legacy seems evident in lowered road-race participation numbers: Fear.

Two nights ago, probably at around 4 a.m., I felt something crawling over my chest in the dark. Like most rational people, I react poorly to that shit, and when it happens, I usually hit my head on the ceiling while flicking the nearest light switch using reflexes and aim I never knew any human, let alone me, could possess. On this occasion, I detected a large tick rambling merrily across my bare tits, even though I was standing up. Its origins were clear enough: The lovable dog who sleeps right beside me.

Rather than carefully capture the bastard and hit it with a hammer—it’s amazing how hard these animals are to demolish—I flicked it away in instinctive revulsion, losing track of it for the rest of the night. This is why I found a tick—surely the same one—lodged in my upper back at around noon the next day.

Its head wasn’t yet embedded, and its shitty, resilient body had not yet begun to swell with the burden of toxic nourishment it was slowly gaining in its grotesque tenancy. After I peeled it off myself, I carefully cut it in half with the lid of a can of tuna fish and disposed of the remains (and the lid).

I doubt I will get sick from this insult, as this tick was a lot larger than the ones reputed to commonly transmit pathogenic bacteria to humans. If I do, I look forward to not going to the hospital and doing my part to keep it clear for both responsibly vaccinated and recklessly unvaccinated individuals. I have honestly reached a point where I am looking at the upsides of ending my life or having it ended while I still have recent memories of being at full physical health and functioning. I make no secret of being certain of chronic discontentment in a world of generally well-meaning-enough but systematically misinformed people and an apocalyptically malicious media-government fusion that will not become unwelded within my natural lifetime.

But jeez, this nephew stuff gets exciting, and tempts me to follow along indefinitely. And I never understood why anyone over fifty bothers running races at all, but maybe I should check in at length with the only family member I have with experience in this area.

(Note: No real flora or fauna were harmed in the creation of this post, other than that fucking tick. And I’d do it again and again and aga