"Ummm because it’ll be hilarious”, has been my response to everyone who asked me why I chose Mobile, AL for my January race. (That, and I knew it’d be decently warm and there’d probably never be another time I’d visit the state of Alabama.) Hilarious was an understatement.
The only thing I knew about Mobile, AL prior to my trip was that Kanye West’s workout plan got Alamay from Mobile, AL to date outside the family, a doublewide and she rode a plane (Mom- I’m sure you have no idea to what I’m referring, feel free to dig out my old Kanye West’s College Dropout CD from 2002 and listen to track 2. It’s probably next to Avril Lavigne). Turns out Kanye’s stereotype was fairly accurate.
After a flight from Chicago to Atlanta, and then a packed connecting one from Atlanta to Mobile I arrived at the regional airport that resembled a lobby of a Holiday Inn. First of all, the flight was packed because the Go Daddy Bowl Game was going on that Sunday night and it was between Northern Illinois University and Arkansas State. So, I was among fellow northern Illinoisans. Little did I know I would soon be among the strangest breed of people I’ve ever met. The people in Mobile, Alabama have got to be from a completely different planet. Them and Lady Gaga…but I don’t think they’re from the same one. After a mix-up with my car rental, I was greeted by my first Alabama alien: Miss Mary Tabb, my first of many cab drivers.
Miss Mary Tabb reminded me of an aspiring, hard to understand, slightly-hoosier Whitney Houston with spunk. She informed me of the booming metropolis of Mobile, home to about 300,000 southerners (which surprised me with it’s size. That’s what she said. HAR.). While she southern drawled about her trip to Chicago 12 years ago, I realized 1. The meter wasn’t running and 2. I’ll need a lot more cash than what I came with now that I’d be cabbing it everywhere. Mary reassured me that she took credit cards though no machine was in sight. Midway through the trek to my hotel, Mary stops at a red light and hobbles out of the car with no warning. I wasn’t sure if she was doing some sort of Chinese fire drill or a rain dance. She got back into the car with a credit card machine and an orange Fanta.
After a flat $25 cab ride (which for all I know Mary could have ripped me off—though on my trip back to the airport the next day I learned she actually gave me a $2 discount. Thanks Miss Mary.), I arrived at the Comfort Suites. Exhausted from my early rising, I decided to relax with Mindy Kailing’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? After that read, I’ve decided she’s my second favorite Indian—second to the one and only, Aziz Ansari, aka T-Strike (Parks and Rec, anyone?) I strategically planned to make my way to the downtown area in the late afternoon so I could knock out 3 southern birdies with one stone: 1. Pick up my race packet 2. Eat my free pasta dinner and 3. See the Mari Gras parade and keep my shirt on.
I asked the front desk how far the government building in the downtown area was from the hotel. With a casual “oh just a couple miles; just straight up Dauphin, right on Broadway and left on Government and you’ll be there” explanation, I figured it couldn’t be too far and decided to hoof my way seeing that it was a beautiful sunny, 70 degree day. Now, let me go ahead and ask you this, readers, what do you think of those people you see just hoofing it alongside a busy road? Do you think they’re a crazy bum wandering along with no actual destination? Because that’s normally my first instinct. And, that was me. The only difference was this little nomad actually had a destination in mind but just no idea how to get there. So while people drove by, assumingly thinking “dat bitch is cray”, many thoughts crossed my mind on this trek.
Thought #1: what the fuck am I doing with my life?
Thought #2: Why is this street called Daphin? I keep wanted to say dolphin. Damn, I wish I was at the zoo.
Thought #3: (context: just walked by a restaurant called "foosackly's") Must take a picture (click). How is there an entire restaurant devoted to just chicken fingers? That’s like an appetizer. Or a meal for 5 year olds. I wonder what the variety of their tenders entails…
Thought #4: (thought ensued after a black teenager shouted out the car window of a truck, “Back dat ass up girl!”) Is he talking to me? Why would he yell at a white girl with literally no ass when he’s in a town full of booty-licious apple bottoms?
Thought #5: Where am I?
Thought #6: (thought ensued after seeing two speed bump signs: one that read “speed lumps”, one that read “speed humps”) What.the.fuck.seriously. I guess they like their roads like they like their women: lumpy.
Thought #7: That hotel dude is an asshole. Seriously, where am I?
Thought #8: (it starts to drizzle) COOOOOL.
Thought #9: (look at watch and realize it’s been an hour) This is definitely more than two miles. Did I already pass Broadway?
Thought #10: This isn’t funny anymore.
After a solid hour and a half, and 6 miles later (I came to learn based on my cab ride back), I arrived at a CVS on Government to get some water, which I decided would be my homebase for the weekend. I arrived in the skyline views (HAH) of downtown Mobile. The two tallest buildings that served as the city’s only remotely skyscrapers (okay, they weren’t close to anything like Chicago) were hotels. I wandered the streets of downtown; many of the old buildings reminded me of the French Quarter of New Orleans with a very European style (minus the berets); other shops were a bit run-down or out-of-business adding a tone of sadness to the otherwise lively streets. The streets were crowded with Northern Illinois fans and Arkansas State, so in a sense, I didn’t feel too out of place-the NIU flags waved with familiarity in the wind. I walked down to the port harbor and then back to the government building to pick up my race packet.
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| The Mobile Regional Airport, reminiscent of a Holiday Inn lobby. |
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| A restaurant devoted to strictly chicken fingers. Normal. |
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| Downtown Mobile. |
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| A little bit of home |
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| The Mobile "skyline" |
The building was crowded with runners and their respective family members eating the complimentary pasta dinner. This was definitely a bonus as no other race offered this amenity fo’ free, AND it freed me of having to dine by myself in a restaurant. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, but I’m just not the type to dine out, go to movies or drink by myself. That would just make me either an old, single retired person, a lonely cat woman or an alcoholic. I’m definitely not the first, I might be on my way to the second and I attempt to avoid the third. I walked through the minimal vendors they had present at the small race packet pick-up area and spotted three girls in massive, debutant-like pastel dresses. Yo, Little Bo Peep, where’s yo’ sheep?! They honestly looked like that and though I desperately wanted to take advantage of this hilarious photo opportunity, I just felt bad for these girls as I figured the race crew hired them as humiliation mascots. I quickly retrieved my packet and two t-shirts and checked out the course map they had printed on poster board. It was decorated with two post-it notes: one that said “hills start at mile 10.5” and the other that read “If you’re running the half and you go across train tracks, you’ve run too far”. Great, mile 10.5 is typically when my legs begin to feel like the bricks of the Home Alone mansion and knowing me I’ll be completely zoned out and run off-course across train tracks and end up in the backyard of Alamay’s doublewide. Digging through my race bag, I noticed I had no time chip for my shoe- odd. When I asked where the time chip was, this is what the woman said: “Oh there’s no time system. The clock just starts when the gun goes off and your time is whenever you cross the finish line after that”. Wait what? “If you’re wanting to run for time, I suggest you get to the front of the line.” Oh, you’re actually serious about this? THIS.IS.BULLSHIT. I actually got intensely angered on the inside by this news. Never in a million years would I have signed up for a race (let alone travel 3.5 hours on a plane to a town where I had more teeth than all its residents combined) if I had known there was no official time chip. I made up my mind to channel my inner-Kenyan and make sure I was at the front of the pack. I marched past the pastel bubbleyum freakshow girls and hit up the free pasta dinner. I sat with another loner and we exchanged a few well wishes of luck and I headed back out to line up for the Mardi Gras parade. Within the hour, the streets were overflowing with Mobile locals. I stuck out like a sore thumb (another figure of speech that confuses me) as one of the only white girls inter-mixed with the majority of the Mobile population being black. I was caught in the middle of chanting Ll-A-BAMA football fans and watched the parade, which included a pissed off horse that wouldn’t behave (and crystallized my hatred for those beasts with killer hooves) and a large grocery shopping cart which reminded me that I had to do that when I got home. And I hate grocery shopping. I headed back to the CVS from earlier in the day and called a cab. Living in Chicago makes you forget that in most cities, you have to call-ahead for a cab; they aren’t as numerous as the amount of times you see Scalabrine on camera during a Bulls game. So I stood in the parking lot (in what I later learned was “the ghetto” of Mobile…whoops. Whatupfoools) for a solid 20 minutes until my cab arrived.
The cab ride that lead to my discovery of my 6 mile trek earlier that day brought me back to the hotel to catch some ZZzz’s. After a goodnight’s sleep, I was ready for the race. I had pre-arranged my cab for pick-up that took me to the course. I knew the intersection at which the race started but when I arrived my normal hour in advance, I was perplexed with the lack of other runners present and a lack of start line. I asked a few people around where I could find the start line (because yes, I will talk to just about anyone and have no shame in asking strangers questions. My friend Kirstin, circa race #10 in Indy, loves this trait about me. And by love I mean, wants to taze me when I do this with her around). They pointed to a neon orange piece of tape along the ground. No other signage indicated the start-line, but just a long strand of tape that you might find around the perimeter of a freshly painted door. The gear check-in was equally as horribly visible, being a soccer mom mini-van with a poster-board sign on the side, half way up the street from where the race directors said it would be.
I finally took my spot at the front with my shoe nearly toeing the highlighter orange tape across the street. The Easter egg girls (still in their Barbie prom gowns and serving as humiliation mascots again) lined in front of the runners, next to the local Boy Scout troops and in unison, the entire crowd sang the National Anthem. The feeling of community resonated throughout the singing patriotic crowd. (I really think my vocal bliss added something special, especially considering my parents have a CD of my Sandburg Middle School drama solo performances in A Christmas Carol and Meet Me in St. Louis. I was quite the thespian.) With the jammin’ local DJ (who probably had a name of like Mobile Mike) and the gun fired, we took off. I was flying and felt great (which would later be the cornerstone to my demise)…until I realized I clocked a swift 7:18 first mile. I attempted to ease my pace, but with my adrenaline pumping and the surroundings of elite runners who can actually maintain a fast pace the entire run, I continued to take it out way too fast. By mile 4, I could feel my legs weakening; my hip flexors stiffened and my left knee whimpered with pain. I maintained an 8 min./mile average until about mile 7 when I hit a wall; the worst part was realizing that I did this to myself simply by getting cocky and taking it out too fast. I played a mental blame game trying to convince myself that it was the RACE’s fault for my stupidity, with their lack of time chips FORCING me to the front; I knew it wasn’t such an intangible thing’s fault- it was my own. And the mental downfall ensued. This was my first race wearing the Garmin Forerunner my dad gave me for Christmas and it’s awesome—it takes your heart rate, tracks your pace and elevation with a GPS, has a virtual race buddy—and does so much more (thanks again, daddio!). But for all it’s incredible features, I focused on one: the feature of the pace buddy that darkens to a black background when you’re under pace. With every mile, I solely concentrated on my pace that was increasing as I slowed: 8:07, 8:19…8:35. And I completely, mentally gave up. My mind threw in the towel as I focused on just staring at my slowing pace every few minutes—it was addicting. I forgot the fun and enjoyment and freedom running gives me and I was swallowed into a physical vs. mental war. And 1:47:01 later, I ran through the narrow finishers chute and walked through it, completed defeated. No guts, no glory. No puke, no heart. Okay, that shit I just made up is terrible, but I didn’t puke and while most of you are probably thinking “Um aren’t you happy you didn’t taste last night’s regurgitated noodles”, assuming I have normal, non-bullemic readers…I wasn’t happy about the non-vom. Because, I’ve puked immediately following the races I ran my fastest; the races I literally gave every last bit of energy I had in my body; the races where I ran so hard, I puked. And I knew I didn’t give everything I could; I let my mind win and forgot to run with my heart.
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| Monster shopping cart in the Mardi Gras parade |
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| Finisher. |
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| Tiny finish line |
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| Bubbleyum twins, thanks for the entertainment! |
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| First marathon finisher |
Filled with disappointed and self-frustration, I continued walking through the chute to retrieve my medal. It was then that I remembered to put things in perspective and not be so hard on myself: The First Light Marathon benefited a local charity, L'Arche Mobile, which is a home for mentally disabled and handicap citizens of the Mobile community. Four of its residents sat in their wheelchairs, supervised, and passed out the wooden medals the home’s residents had painted and made for finishers. As the one resident reached to hang the ribbon around my leaned in neck, I remembered that this is what my journey is all about—though I’m running to fundraise for breast cancer research, every individual race I sign up and pay for benefits a charity and helps others. I may have not run my fastest time, but I did a good thing and the resident smiled with an unspoken “thank you”. I couldn’t help but to think about my Uncle Dennis, my mom’s brother, who, too, is severely mentally handicapped and in a wonderful facility in Kankakee, IL, where its residents do arts and crafts, similar to the painted medal I had just received. It was an emotional realization but a much-needed one for me to walk off the course with a small smile on my face. I made my way to a bench to stretch and call my family and boyfriend awaiting my results.
Walking back to my home base (the sketchy CVS parking lot), I watched the first marathoner come in to the finish—the crowd roared with encouragement as he clung to his thigh in obvious pain. This moment, too, reminded me of why I wake up at 5AM on one Sunday every month: the feeling of just finishing. Nearing the local CVS pharmacy, I made friends with two cops who were directing traffic for the race. They immediately realized I wasn’t from their hood and whipped up some friendly conversation. This was when I had the perfect chance to ask the perplexing question that had been on my mind all weekend: WHY were those girls dressed up like Princess Peach?! They explained to me that they were Azalea Trail Maids (I just had to wikipedia that shit because I kept calling them Amazon Ezekiel trail girls. My bad.) These girls are “official town ambassadors” that hone “southern hospitality” mannerisms of the old-time era in Mobile. I wanted to ask if they still had make-shift slaves just to remember “the old times” too. Yeah that was pretty terrible of me, but I still don’t get the point of those cakepop girls. Which, led me to snap a photo of them without guilt as I discovered they CHOSE to dress like this and were not, in fact, used as freakshow mascots.
I hung out in the CVS parking lot waiting for my cab where I was approached by a short, limping lady. The next words out of her mouth really just summed up my experience in Mobile, AL: “You wannnnntttt some Koooool-Aid?” she asked. In my teacher’s pet, nervous, if gerbils-could-talk-this-is-what-they’d-sound-line voice I gently responded, “Umm…no, thank you.” As the effervescent advocate of her Kool-Aid she rebuttled with, “I’ve got allllll kinds of Kool-Aid” and hobbled off with her kooler pack on wheels. I mean, there very well might have been some nice, refreshingly-chilled purple drank in that mini-fridge on wheels of hers, but I think it was most likely packed with drugs. Those drugs clearly ate away at this woman’s teeth and seeing that I was called shark by my 7th grade teacher because of my crazy grill, I have every intention of keeping my fixed beaver-like chompers in tact and just said no.
The cab company that I’m sure knew me by the sound of my Chicago voice retrieved me from the sketchy parking lot and I hopped in the shower upon returning to the hotel. With nothing left to do in Mobile, I decided to just head to the Mobile Airport with plenty of time to spare. I arrived there at 12:31PM. The only reason I knew this was because that was the time Chad (boyfriend) called and I told him I’d call him back once I was through security; I called him back at 12:44PM. Yes, a whopping 13 minutes to navigate through this “airport”. In fact, as I pulled up my email to get my eTicket number to plug into the check-in kiosk, the woman behind the desk asked for my name and before I knew it, she was pointing to my name, flight number, confirmation number and eTicket number on her clipboard. Yes, they had a clipboard with every single traveler’s flight information; I felt like I was checking in for a 4th grade field trip. Up the stairs, I stood in the short, single-file line that they deemed “security check”. The TSA worker that stood at a very student-council like podium chatted up a storm and may or may not have actually looked at my ID. The workers cackled about my “running stick” and seemed to lack any security protocol which got me to the gate area in minutes. Since there were only 7 gates and my flight wasn’t for another 3 hours, I didn’t have a gate assignment so I set up shop at a table where I ordered a sandwich and finished my book. My flight was delayed by about 40 minutes but luckily didn’t affect my connecting flight in Atlanta. A flight of slumber, I was back in Chicago and welcomed by Bob and Mary E.
And that, ladies and gents, is Mobile, AL in a nutshell. I can honestly say I’m glad I ventured there as part of this trip, but those 30 hours there were enough to last me a lifetime and I can’t fathom a reason as to why I’d ever return. Farewell, Miss Mary Tabb, keep driving your cab.
And here I am, 6 days away from my final race. And I.cannot.wait. Nor can I truly express my excitement so I'll restrain for now. I’ll be posting one last time before the big finale. Stay tuned.
