La Jolla Half Marathon, all Six Hours of it
Nazario Romero, 35, dominated the La Jolla Half Marathon after taking the lead early in the race.
I had the prestigious honor of shooting the La Jolla Half Marathon – 13.1 miles of rolling seaside hills and beach pathways winding through Del Mar and La Jolla – from the back of the press truck. See the online version at the La Jolla Light website.
My day started at 5:45 am, when I showed up at the finish line in La Jolla to park my car and ride a bus to the start of the race at the Del Mar fairgrounds. The press kit my editor had passed along to me said the buses would run from 5:00 to 6:00. My bus didn’t leave until 6:30. My concern was shared by a runner sitting across the aisle, who had time to slowly finish her yogurt and granola before asking a volunteer why we hadn’t left yet.
I wasn’t worried. In any case, the seats on the bus were amply cushioned and the race was at 7:30. That gave us a whole hour to make it just a few exits north on the I-5 freeway.
Forty-five minutes later we finally got off the damned freeway and onto the fairgrounds. Our off-ramp had been clogged by thousands of runners, too busy patting themselves on the back for waking up to run for hours to exit the freeway coherently. A couple young runners ditched their driver, presumably reasoning that walking the last stretch of freeway would be faster than driving. And if you’re running 13.1 miles, what’s another two miles of walking anyway?
It was 15 minutes before the gun and I had to pee. There were dozens of portapotties, yet the lines were comically long, again clogged by hundreds of runners afraid of having to run for hours with a bag of urine bouncing against their lower intestines. I thought of using my press pass as justification to cut in front of a hundred people. I decided I could sit on my ass for an hour and a half without using a bathroom.
And that’s what it amounted to. I found the press truck in front of the start line, met some cheery volunteers, gladly received a cushion and hopped in with a couple writers, one from the North County Times, and a girl from Sport Photo.
This gave me pause. I was the only photojournalist in the press truck. The girl from Sport Photo technically had a camera, but she might as well have been holding up a banana – her Nikon had the kit lens and a small dedicated flash with a pointless diffuser, dutifully firing pitiful bursts of light despite the runners being over a hundred feet away.
When the race was a few minutes old, I understood why I was the only photojournalist in the esteemed press pickup; the vantage was simply not worth the effort to the Union-Tribune photographer I found at the finish line. I did the math. If I had just wanted to cover the finish line and get the typical shot of an emotional runner thanking God and finishing with his arms in the air, I could have woken up about two hours later.
But I was in it for the long haul. I didn’t even finish when the winner finished. I decided before I got there that I was going to stay until the very last runner crossed the finish line. And I did exactly that. I figured that the person who finished dead last in a field of 5,392 runners must have an interesting story to tell. I was close to being right – I photographed the last runner, but the second-to-last was way more interesting. She was Aurora Ortiz, aka “Little Giant” at the blind community center. Blind and maybe not even five feet tall, she’s done 16 half marathons. But I got a better shot of another blind runner, who finished with her brother a bit earlier.
Christina Principe embraces her brother Tony Principe in the medical tent after collapsing in celebration at the finish line of the La Jolla Half Marathon on April 26, 2009. Tony and Christina, who is legally blind, finished in 2 hours, 8 minutes and 5 seconds.
I stretched a story that the U-T photographer probably alotted one hour of time on site into six hours of waiting and shooting. I wasn’t busy, so why not get some shots no one else had (even if they didn’t want them anyway)? I have a compulsion that makes it very hard for me to leave a story before it is completely over. In any case, whenever possible I like to shoot a story as if it’s the New York Times and in additon to A1 they’re running an exclusive audio slideshow with full screen visuals and commentary.
I would have missed a Meridian Collective meeting the day of the race, but they were nice enough to postpone it just for me.
