Orlando, a blighted horror screaming for its own eradication, will host the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials
Fairbanks, Flint, and Syracuse have too much going on next winter to step up
Last month, Orlando, Florida—a swarming array of mullets and pole-dancers planted in a superheated swamp—was chosen to host the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Team Trials for both men and women. The races will be held on February 3, 2024.
The qualifying period began on January 1 of this year (as it probably would have even had the Tokyo Olympics happened on shedyool) and ends on December 5 of next year, meaning that the window for entry has already been lowered halfway to the sill. The end date was presumably selected to accommodate the quadrennial blitz of topological microdosers who use the California International Marathon as a last-chance Trials qualifying effort.
Compared to 2020, the qualifying standards are slightly harder for men and significantly so for women, making them roughly equivalent. The men’s marks of 1:04:00 for 21.1K and 2:19:00 42.2K were tightened to 1:03:00 and 2:18:00, while the women’s times were moved from 1:13:00 and 2:45:00 to 1:12:00 and 2:37:00.
The reliably superfluous and arid Martin Fritz Huber of Outside Online responded in his usual way to this “controversy,” noting that “Opinions are divided on whether tougher entry standards are a good idea” before going on to describe and dismiss the reasonable opinion while embracing the stupid one with a shoulder-shrugging “What can it hurt?” Here, he suggests the creation of a Wannabe Marathon, which might partially mollify whiners like Alison Wade and Peter Bromka but is otherwise as unnecessary as “non-binary.”
Anyone who’s been to the middle of Florida understands and appreciates the breathtaking decadence of the region, with the world’s most flamboyantly pious Christians living merrily alongside the planet’s most ambitiously wayward drunks and meth-heads. Sometimes in the same trailer. And most Americans have been there, often without their consent or knowledge. Someone probably dragged you as a child to Disney World and its satellite theme parks, monstrosities to a one; and if you escaped that, you probably got married and had kids and put a television in your house and were soon forced to take those kids to Orlando (technically, Lake Buena Vista).
And if you have somehow never been to the Orlando area to spend money on that relentlessly hypocritical Disney empire—now quietly busy expanding in Muslim countries while roaring about the need for expanded LGBTQIA+ (sp) rights—then if you’re over, say, 40 yourself, you almost certainly have or had relatives there. My grandmother moved there from Columbus, Ohio in the late 1970s, not knowing she would live to see 100 (she was born shortly after the RMS Titanic sank, and died late in President Obama’s first term) and therefore spend a third of her life in Winter Spring. That poor woman. And I still have hillbilly relatives in the area despite an overall paucity of blood relations.
Fortuitously, I already have or can at least manufacture a defensible grudge against the people who will be managing the Orlando Trials.
In the summer of 2004, I moved to Florida and, after the state experienced four hurricanes in a six-week period, got a job at a book-publishing company right next to the former offices of the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, which were then surrounded by a cyclone fence. This was almost three years after a photo editor of the Enquirer had died of anthrax and traces of the bacteria were found on the premises. Now that’s a respiratory pathogen people should worry about.
In the months between these events, I was encouraged to apply for the “Florida’s Finest” program generously sponsored by the now-defunct Florida Running & Triathlon Magazine. The publication chose six men and six women from, or at least in, Florida to take part in the Disney Marathon or Half Marathon in early January. Despite coming off what would prove to be my best year of racing, I was not planning to run any marathons in Florida. But it was a free weekend at a nice resort and competition for spots on the “team” wasn’t the toughest, so I went for it.
Given how I comported myself during the late fall of 2004, I had no business running even as well as I did at Disney in January 2005, in what proved (or has proven) to be my last serious marathon. But I wound up second, only nine minutes behind the incredibly ebullient Adriano Bastos of Brazil, who competed in what looked more like the bottoms of a set of Underoos than a legit Speedo. I don’t know why this guy kept coming back to run 2:19-2:20 and win this no-prize-money race, but he without a doubt loved life.
In the race, I was by myself almost the entire way, other than running the first mile with former Central Mass Striders clubmate Darin Shearer (in around six minutes) much of mile 12 with a guy I knew from Massachusetts who was running the accompanying half-marathon. I think I was in third place from seven miles on—a handful of half-marathoners were also ahead of me—and then right before 25 miles, I caught a Kenyan named Peter Tanui who’d entered late and run with Bastos for most of the race.
I had made up a literal mile on this guy—I’d spotted him with Bastos at a turnaround past 20 miles—and the second I was alongside, he went from about seven-minute pace to a dead stop. Even at the time, I was thinking “He was at least going to jog it in until I lumbered by, and then he was like ‘if that guy’s gonna beat me, I’m out.” And bail he did. I considered stopping myself to ask if this was why he had quit, and to assure him I didn’t blame him before lumbering on. But I felt good, just grinding out 5:40s and knowing the entire way this was exactly what I had in me, if my legs and the pouch between them held up.
The experience produced one of the most memorable race-finish photos I’ve been in.
After discovering only today that I was given a turn as Florida Man almost eighteen years ago, I'm going to sue someone. They might as well have called me a kiddie-diddler or a childhood friend of Kanye West. Sure, I was living there, but…
I was still living in Florida the next fall when it came time to apply for the Florida’s Finest program. I wanted to run the half, which for the first time was being held the day before the marathon so that entrants could do both if they wanted—the “Goofy Challenge.” One problem: I’d been out of commission for much of the year with what may have been a sports hernia, as those were popular fifteen years ago.
I had driven across Florida that summer to see a specialist, whereupon a small team of intent-looking women applied cold, cold goop to my junk before sending me back on a drive across the Everglades. (I had scraped off the goop by then.) Since I didn’t know what kind of shape I’d be in come January, or if I would even be able to run hard, I elected not to apply.
By the end of the year, about a week before the 2006 Disney Marathon and Half-Marathon, I was in decent shape and no longer feeling the inguinal woes that had tainted most of my 2005. So I called up the race director to see if I could still get into the half. I wasn’t asking for a comped entry—I was willing to pay for a bib. I just wanted a late entry and assumed they might accommodate me since I’d been second (and the first American!) at the most recent running of the marathon.
Alas, my request was quickly denied. I could actually hear the race director say “no” to whoever I was on the phone with at Track Shack, the Orlando running store the race director owns, as his employee was doing a poor job of covering the phone handset.
I was a little surprised; sure, I was a 2:24 guy at best, but his race was also an over-bloated citizen marathon that no longer attracted anyone decent and had too many cobblestones on the course. But I wasn’t really miffed until the next week, when I read this story about a woman who planned to do the “Goofy Challenge” seven and a half months pregnant.
I wish today that I hadn’t seen this line:
Race director Jon Hughes said he has alerted the medical personnel along the course at both races of her condition.
Okay, so this guy went out of his way—or pretended to—to accommodate an obviously anorexic personal trainer’s medically questionable stunt, but dismissed my case for paying for a “last-minute” bib? For this, he’s a putz and always will be, and has no way to atone for it whatsoever. Tendrils of shame should pervade his entire family, even if it includes some of my own relatives.
And it turns out he’s not only still in charge of the Disney events, but will now also direct the Olympic Trials.
Anytime a blurb about a race director—whether or not the writer knows when to use “its” and when to include an apostrophe—mentions “marketing efforts” and “marketing skills” multiple times, it’s a sign the subject of the blurb has probably brought more ruin than good to running. And a willingness to be a lifelong Orlando-area resident can’t herald anything good.
I hope the Trials go well for everyone there. The weather is likely to be warm and humid, but the Olympics certainly will be, too. The right spectators and a team of dynamic logistics experts can turn even a grim venue like Orlando into the locus of an effective and warmly remembered Olympic Marathon Team Trials. But while the participants themselves deserve to enjoy an Orlando bloom, I must equally hope and pray for the event as a whole to go south for the organizers so that the Trials never return to any portion of Florida. Not even if someone wants to set up a 100-lap criterium course around the old Enquirer building.