Dhammerica – Day Seven

Start of day: Same as most other days. We decide to watch – An Inconvenient Truth. Good Watch. Al Gore deserves most of the publicity he has received in its wake. Quite a wholesome presentation of the facts. Time to take stock for all of us about an issue which shall escalate in our lifetimes.

This is also the day we collect our race bib. We had decided that we shall beat the weekend traffic to the venue and avoid rushing. We opt for a suburban train – NJ Transit to Long Branch. For the first time, we encounter some inefficiency. There is a train head of us which is a local and some passengers on our train must catch it in transit. Hence our train trails the local, thus becoming a local itself for much of the transit to Long Branch. We are livid since this jeopardizes our dinner with another lovely lady. Damn NJ Transit.

By the time we actually reach Long Branch, its about 90 minutes before closure of the counters. We try flagging down cabs to take us to the Ocean spa, located about a mile away, but they are either full or don’t stop! It’s good that we had memorized the locations on Google Maps and hence we resort to walking to the venue. We walk down to the fair, collect our goodie bag, buy a few running related material – like a fuel belt and look around. One of the organizers remark that we have come quite a long way to run the marathon. We have!

There was only 1 Indian running in the marathon. D.
In fact there weren’t too many foreign runners registered other than Canadian runners.

Anyways, while we are browsing around, our alert buddy calls up to remind us that there is a train leaving in exactly 9 minutes for NY and if we miss it, we will end up waiting another hour for the next one.
We switch into action mode, emerging out the shopping daze. We try and ask for assistance for a cab, but while we hunt around, including asking a police car, none emerges. IN the midst of the frenzied hunting, we also notice 4 stretch limos coming into the resort cum spa for a wedding. That’s more than the entire no we have seen ever!

Ok, now action. (Not much light and no cameras!) Although we are not challenged for a personal best at the mile, the station is still a mile away and there is a bag on our back. We do get there, quite breathless, about 15 seconds before the train leaves.
The evening is largely uneventful, since our buddy is equally upset that we missed dinner with another dear friend. The only upside is our brand new Ipod nano which tries to make up for a sleepy & sulking buddy.