It's a Long Hard Journey

On October 14, 2006, Crazy Craig and his two partners in insanity sharpened their running skills and joined two thousand others in running the Under Armour Baltimore Marathon. This meant we all received some quick history and geography lessons about Baltimore including a great loop around Ft. McHenry, a nifty race finisher blue crab medallion and a real running shirt from the Under Armour people. Most race t-shirts are cotton and useless for running. This shirt was great; it will not find its way into my running shirt quilt or braided rug.

There were a lot of people running, each of us with a different story and on a different journey. The marathoners were joined along part of the course by additional thousands running the marathon relay and the half marathon races.

For Dave, Andrew and I, this was to be pretty speedy running. No stops for salted boiled potatoes, M&Ms, donuts or other trail run delectables. It was a GU and GatorAde diet for me along all 26.2 miles.

For some of the non-humans along the race course though, the journey was different and far more challenging. My bird list, kept in my head, mile by mile, was sparse. It is fall and little is singing and what was singing or squawking was overpowered by the sounds of human life in the city. This course covers much of Baltimore and so habitat diversity was on the thin side in most places.

The bird highlight might have been the double crested cormorant staggering out of the water on the north side of Ft. McHenry. The best habitat was the tidal marsh on what might have been the southwest corner of this National Park Service site but there was no time for further investigation. My bird list numbered only 9 species.

What gave me a lift however, somewhere around mile 23, was a monarch butterfly. It would never have been off the ground in the low 40 degree temperatures of our 8 AM start by 11 AM, the sun had warmed its overnight roost and it was again on its way to Michoacan, Mexico.

Monarch populations in the northeastern US this year were impressively high. Soon after our Sunday run, the reports of hundreds of thousands of migrating monarchs coalescing into a massive orange, balck and white maelstrom headed for the US Mexico border began to appear on the listserv overseen by our friends at Monarch Watch

That lone butterfly, one at the tail end of the migration that passed south for the winter, gave me a kick that pushed me over the finish line; it was better than energy gels or cheering crowds.

My journey that day was easy; the butterfly had thousands of miles yet to cover before it rested among the limbs of the oyamel fir trees high up in the mountains of western Mexico sometime in early December.