I return to Chiang Mai, the wonderfully affordable holiday destination, in hopes of achieving further glory at the Chiang Mai Marathon events.
I had placed first overall in the half-marathon four years ago, back when the event was a small, homey affair, and we chatted with the race director and got to know many of the other runners, and practically our only spectators at the sunrise event were some ladyboys heading home after working at the bars all night. Now the Chiang Mai event has grown into a regional economic juggernaut with over 7,000 participants coming from all over the world, hundreds of volunteers, costumed dancers and musicians, and the entire city festooned with garish banners welcoming the runners and sound trucks crawling through the city streets blaring out announcements for the race. I had watched the first “Hunger Games” movie on the flight over, and all this new powerful, Chiang Mai Marathon event build-up and pageantry reminded me of the spectacle built up around the hunger games contest in the dystopian movie.
I join over 2,000 other runners in the 10.6-kilometer event (there are 4 races starting one hour apart). We start the race to an explosion of cannons shooting smoke into the air, rows of musicians beating on drums, and the city's top celebrities and political officials cheering us on. I start on the front line which appears to have been a mistake as runners burst past me and I am nearly knocked off my feet by a guy in an orange singlet sprinting at absolutely full speed.
I stay behind Arnaud, and at 1k which we apparently ran in 3:53, there are at least 20 guys ahead of us and I wonder whether it was cocky of me to have expected to be on the podium at all – even just for my age group.
At the starting line we had identified other runners in our age group based on their race numbers including a local 50-59 year old Thai clad in clunky red generic shoes and cheap cotton shorts, who had warmly wished me well in the race. He did not look like a particularly elite athlete – I understood him to say that he was a worker in a rice farming village to the south of Chiang Mai. But this age-group rival burst quickly out at the start, and I knew he must be in the large pack ahead of me, a pack that seemed to be pulling further and further ahead. So I reluctantly surged past Arnaud and begin picking off the other runners one by one. By 3k I spotted the heavy red shoes of my local Thai age-group competitor and I settled in behind him for awhile. When I had gather enough strength to sprint past him he valiantly tried to stay with me, but after his fast start was laboring and eventually dropped off.
Ultimately I managed to move all the way up to 4th position almost catching the guy in the orange singlet who had almost knocked me down at the start and who apologized profusely when he turned and saw me cross the finish line.
Naturally there are lavish awards to the victors in this epic tournament. Here you can see me being awarded with an extravagant 3,000 baht first-place cash prize – an enormous amount of money in low-cost northern Thailand.
My rival in the bulky red shoes is gracious and magnanimous in the face of his crushing defeat afterwards. I feel almost bad to have denied him victory, presuming he would make better use of the huge prize winning. I ponder settling in Chiang Mai myself and living off the prize money.
Instead I somehow managed to squander every last cent of my precious winnings within the next day, frivolously blowing it all on over-priced, airport pastries and cappuccinos, useless plasticky Christmas trinkets, and ephemeral, online text stickers...
