Ready to Hit the Road

By Keeping a Marathon Travel Bag Nearby, You’re Always Ready to Race.

by Judy Henderson

© 2008 42K(+) Press, Inc.

My flight was delayed, but I didn’t think too much about it. After all, I had all day to get from Toronto to Indianapolis. I was on my way from my sensible life (managing a software-implementation project in Canada) to my completely nonsensical life (running the inaugural Tecumseh Trail Marathon, somewhere in the hills of southern Indiana). It was already an insane endeavor; outside of Honolulu or Tucson, who had ever heard of a December marathon? I was a relative newbie—I had run only nine marathons at that point in my career—and was a bit naive about these things. What could go wrong?

Because of the flight schedules, I had been forced to budget a full day for the travel. When the flight from Toronto to Chicago was first delayed, I didn’t worry. When it was delayed again, I realized that I would probably miss my connection in Chicago, and I started to strategize about getting from Chicago to Indianapolis to Bloomington. I had no doubts that I could get to the race in time; I had plenty of running friends in Chicago who were making the trek, and I figured that, at the very least, they could help me deal with the travel from Chicago to Bloomington.

But then it hit me, like a bolt out of the (cloudy) blue sky: I had broken a cardinal rule of marathoning. Every piece of running gear that I had packed for this race was checked in baggage on a flight that was starting to look very doubtful. While I might make it to Bloomington on time, suddenly I was not so sure about my bag. What the heck was I going to do?

Lucky for me, I’m a list maker, and in my trusty old Palm Pilot, I had an ever-expanding marathon packing list stored in “Memos.” If my stuff did not arrive, I knew that all I had to do was consult my Pilot. Everything (well, theoretically everything) that I might need for the Saturday-morning race would be on that list. The question was whether I could replace everything in time.

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