Terry Fox Marathon Busan

Sunday, October 15th - The first annual Terry Fox marathon was held in Busan. The race has been held for several years in Seoul and there were over a thousand participants. Unfortunately few of those were Canadians.

We had a gig in PNU the night before so I woke up at 6:40 with about 4 hours of sleep. However, I was pretty excited as this was my first marathon of any kind since I began running around a year ago. A group of us met at around 7am and jumped into taxis to get to the start line and register. The course started near Olympic park (a glorified parking lot) and went out along the yacht club to Dong Baek point and then looped back.

We were supposed to get started at 8am. but we ended up standing around for almost an hour listening to speeches in Korean (with the exception of the ambassador who gave a brief and relatively unimpressive pep talk), watching some very bad cheerleader routines and then listening to the Korean anthem. I guess it is not a nationalistic event so I was not really bothered by the lack of the Canadian anthem. It was the group warm-up that really drove me nuts. Everyone in a crowd dancing to Korean soccer music! Well, it wasn't that bad, I was just really frustrated that they delayed the start for so long. I was ready to run at 8!!

The run itself was good, it is neat to have roads closed off and police re-directing traffic around us. I relished the anger of those impatient drivers who were yelling at the police because the wouldn't let them cut across the path of the racers. Kevin(pictured), Raphael and I ran together along with most of my co-workers and staff from the school. It was a lot of fun but I have immediately set my sites on a 10k somewhere in the near future.

I should say, there was some tragic irony/hyposcrisy/plain ignorance that occured at the end of the race.Some people who had finished before us (and we ran pretty hard!) were lounging under the tents and puffing away on cigarettes. At first, I thought it was so weird that these runners celebrated the completion of a marathon with a cigarette. But then it occurred to me that the whole point of this marathon was to fight cancer and that cigarettes are leading the fight against the fight against cancer (wordy?).

In otherwords, it's like firing off an AK-47 at a peace rally.