Troubled LA Marathon, I am changing plan to run Surf City Marathon.

by luluorange Posted November 11, 2008 Digg! this story! Digg! this story.

Disturbing news about the LA Marathon.  For 23 years, LA marathon had occurred on the first Sunday of March every year.  In September, Frank McCourt (who owns LA Dodgers) acquired the rights to operate LA Marathon.  They gave in the City’s demand that the race be moved from its traditional Sunday in early March to the Monday Presidents’ Day (February 16, 09)

 

The calendar change was designed to address complaints form religious leaders, who blamed race-day road closure and traffics congestion for making it difficult for their congregations to get to church.  I mean, are you kidding me?  Who runs marathon on a Monday?  In addition, President’s day is NOT a holiday for a lot of people, I for one, have NEVER gotten that day off but I was willing to take a vacation day to run it.

 

So to add insult to injury, it was announced yesterday, that the race day will be moved AGAIN to May 25th, 09.   Need I say more?  My running club – LA Leggers, one of the official training programs for LA Marathon, has about 1300 members training for this race.  We are in peak training season, so now…at the end of February; we have no race to run.  Is this lovely?  Angry emails started to circulate last night amongst the members.

 

I took action quickly this morning, and signed up for the very limited space Surf City Marathon in Huntington Beach.  The race allows 15,000 runners but only 1,500 are to run the full marathon because of the bike path route limitation.  I figured most people are going to scramble to find a race to run in the area, I better get on it.  Forget about LA, if these people don’t know how to respect the runners and all they care about is their political agenda, I want no part of it.  I hope they go bankrupt, as it stands, they were in financial trouble (I wonder why), and they didn’t pay the elite runners who won the race two years ago.  Can you imagine that?  Runners that run as a business, run to win money, they won the race but didn’t get paid.  Those people are already boy-cutting the race; they are predicting the race participation will be down by 30 to 50%.

 

I still have yet to hear the backlash from this idiotic move from our club officials as to what are all the people going to do.  No one can maintain peak training condition for three months.  Should be interesting, I’ll keep everyone posted.  :)

Meanwhile, check out the Surf City Marathon link.

http://www.runsurfcity.com/

 

 

 

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3 Comments so far

  1. Mitch Roberts on November 11th, 2008

    Wow, this is really crappy. To change it once is one thing, to change it a second time sucks. I wonder what they are thinking? I mean, for all of those who have booked travel plans simply for the marathon - those all have to be rebooked or even worse cancelled.

    The Lake Stevens 70.3 triathlon did the same thing this year - typically the second weekend of July (perfect if you are training for the Ironman Canada like me) they instead moved it to the 3rd weekend in August - the weekend before my Ironman.

  2. greenking17 on November 11th, 2008

    this is weird for me to read…I have never had any issues with any of my races. man, that would be a bummer for me for sure!!! I can understand if people were just hot about this. Well, good luck with the other marathon, it looks like a good one baased on the web-site. hope your training continues to go well.

    Cheers…

    GK17

  3. marathonerwannabe on November 12th, 2008

    This really sucks. The Surf City site is saying that they are working to add capacity due to the date change. I think that is pretty cool.

    Glad to hear you are feeling better. ;-)