I quickly discovered that the marathon isn’t really spectator friendly, unless you want to get to the start before sunrise and stay at the finish until after sunset. I found getting to a place to view the race was difficult. After driving around for over an hour, I ended up stopping at 17th and Peoria near one of the watering stations.
I guess I shouldn’t have stopped to get that cup of coffee.
It was a little chilly, so I’m glad I didn’t have to wait long for the runners to begin appearing. At 9:25 AM, the first runner arrived. It was Jason Butler of Oklahoma City. He went on to win the marathon, running the 26.2 mile course in 2:35:45. That’s a 5:56 mile average. Pretty damned fast.
Within an hour I’d shot a thousand pictures of the first hundred or so runners. It’s amazing how many pictures you actually end up with when you’re shooting ten frames per second.
I decided not to wait for the hundreds of other runners to arrive and walked back to the car. After navigating through the neighborhoods to avoid all of the blocked streets, I headed home to edit.
After a quick bathroom break (that damned coffee) I began the reviewing and editing process. End result? I kept eighty-four pictures out of the thousand.
11/21/16 update: My new licensing agency sent me an email this morning. They said they couldn’t license my photos without permission of the organizers. Seriously? A public event? Oh well. I’m trying to find contact information for the Route 66 folks (absent on their website). Yes, I checked for media information before I went.
We’ll see how this plays out.
