Utica Boilermaker 15K - July 8, 2007

Contributed by Gordon Row

For about a decade, I’ve wondered about the Utica Boilermaker: this famous massive race hosted, improbably, by the city of Utica NY. Leslie and I have driven right by the city – and the race course – probably 150 times on the way to her ancestral homes in Syracuse and the Thousand Islands , and yet I’ve never run it. This weekend, the stars aligned. I joined a bunch of her relatives, and we signed up for the 30th running of this special race.

The Boilermaker is the country’s largest 15K road race, and somewhat of a special character in itself. I have to say that from my adoptive central-New-York perspective, it is somewhat inexplicable. . OK, this will sound snobby. Utica is approximately close to nowhere in particular. Utica is Worcester to Syracuse . More to the point, Utica is a slightly down-on-its-luck industrial city with some serious pluck. The Boilermaker is clearly THE major civic event, and it grips the city like a bad case of the malarial sweats. It is a freewheeling, giddy, unfettered sporting event that carries with it a sense of the outrageous at every turn. I’ll start by recommending this as a rare thing: so much about our lives, and our running events, is tamed, diluted and cosseted so that we feel we are grudgingly being allowed a little bit of exercise. The Boilermaker is a big, rollicking, gritty romp, with plenty of opportunity to blow off steam in every sense.

The Boilermaker name is a double-entendre. It both refers to the host of the starting line: The Utica Boilers Company. (Which makes, um…boilers) and to the emphatically alcoholic theme of the event (which is sponsored by a brewery). So, let me summarize the event. It’s hot. It’s boiling hot, as a matter of fact. Then you drink a lot of beer. The race has various taglines and subtitles, including: “the party where a race breaks out!”

Coming from a Bostonian perspective, I have to say that this race resembles only one other: the Boston Marathon. Or, turned around: This is the only other race I’ve witnessed that holds a candle to Boston in terms of the core character of the event. In addition, this race has got plenty of character of its own, yaknowhatimsayintaya? I have to say, the Boilermaker makes Boston look rather prissy, wouldn’t you quite agree, lovey?

The Day
At 4:20am, the alarms went off, we cursed, brewed coffee, pulled on running gear and piled in the cars to head south to Utica . 3 cousins, a fiancée, an uncle, a pit bull terrier named Jackson, and me. As we were driving along the New York Thruway, I got my first whiff of the spectacle. It seemed that every single car on the road was filled with runners. When we stopped at a rest stop, instead of the typical NY Thruway Rest Stop population (fanny-packed seniors, miserable-looking families crammed into overloaded minivans, etc), the entire rest stop was teeming with runners. The lines for the rest rooms extended out into the lobby and doorways. Our first hint that we were behind schedule was that most of these runners already had their bib numbers on and were doing warm-ups in the parking lot.

We got to the Utica exit only to see a line of traffic still trying to exit the highway. At this point we pulled out our secret weapon: my brother-in-law, Erik, the federal border-enforcement agent and a can-do kinda guy. A couple of legal-because-I’m-a-fed U-turns and we shot to the head of the line. Still, we only had 30 minutes to get our packets and get to the starting line. People were starting to park on the exit ramps, so we followed suit, hastily changing on the roadside and stashing our valuables. We jogged up towards the starting area, which was a 50-acre teeming mass of runners and signs. Thankfully, the cousins had run before, and knew where to go, so we cut nervously through the crowd to find the registration area. Gad – were we the ONLY ones that hadn’t picked up our numbers earlier? With 14 minutes to go, we got our numbers and chips! Now, for a pit stop. The lines for the portajohns looked like Napoleons troops leaving Russia . But wait! These were only women in those lines. The male half of the participants were scampering off to pee against bushes, dumpsters, slag-piles, cinder blocks, pig-iron, or anything that would stand still, and plenty of sporting women joined them. I followed suit, and then peeled off to find my corral. Seven minutes to go. I trotted through the frat-party-thick throng, trying to sense which direction they were surging. A tinny distant PA system crackled out unhelpful instructions: “If you have a bib number that is green, grey, orange, yellow, or purple, and are NOT an elite runner, you should head SOUTH at the Bleeker St overpass” Finally, in the middle of a huge 5-way intersection, I grabbed a small woman wearing an official shirt and said “Where do I go!?” She looked at my bib and said calmly “LEFT!” Oh, right, thanks. Finally, I somehow spotted a corral of runners with matching orange bibs, and I crawled under a length of snow-fencing, held up for me by a 6-year old kid and an ancient lady towing an oxygen bottle. I was there! 4 minutes to spare. OK, so much for a warmup, water stop and stretching.

By now the overcast skies had cleared and I realized that I was sweating copiously. This was going to be HOT. Damn. Leaving my singlet in the car was a dumb move. Someone handed me a cup of water. The water was about 85 degrees, and tasted strongly of…toluene with a hint of boric acid and a nice lacquer finish. OK, so I poured that one over my head and hoped for a water stop soon.

The Race
At the starting gun, the throng surged forward in an ugly mass with a big rowdy roar, and we headed off through the streets. The course jogs around through the quadrants of the city, apparently with a competition between neighborhoods to put on the best show. This is really the best part: as runners, we were constantly entertained by musical acts, ethnic tableaux (in a sort of Worlds Fair motif) and pure roadside hilarity. Utica is a big sweaty working class town, and despite the stereotype of distance running as a niche sport, every type of person was there to either run or yell at the runners. I passed big burly guys with tattoos and straining beerbellies, yelling “c’mon, wuss! you’re looking great!”, chicanos in leather jackets, preppies, old guys in Shriners hats, barefoot kids, the whole works. I realized later that the entire 9.3-mile course was lined on both sides with live entertainment and hollering spectators. God Bless ‘em!

Favorite racecourse images:

• the wise guy stationed at the 1/10th mile mark, holding up a sign saying “9.2 miles to go!!”. Har har.
• the dueling belly-dancers at mile 2
• a big flat-bed trailer with a troupe of polish traditional dancers spinning and wheeling to accordion music
• a beetfaced Irish guy wearing a complete leprechaun costume and holding a cauldron, sprinkling imaginary “luck” on the runners and murmuring Irish blessings like some sort of off-duty priest.
• a guy on stilts with Uncle Sam pants, giving high-fives to the runners. (I had to jump up to high-five him)
• my total favorite: a searingly loud acid-rock band (3 ghastly pale skinny guys covered in tattoos and piercings), amped and distorted beyond comprehension but putting out a really great beat, playing in the ruins of an abandoned gas station, with re-bar and conduits jutting up around them
• a huge squad of women and girls wearing custom tees that said “Popsicle Stand” and handing out popsicles. Obviously a huge and beloved tradition. I didn’t get a popsicle, but then a runner ahead of me lobbed a handful of them back over his head and I caught a nice lime one. Delicious.
• 3 guys sitting in lawn chairs on the inside of a tight corner, grilling burgers right on the curb. I could have easily grabbed one.
• looking to my right at mile 2 and noticing that I was running next to Bill Rodgers. I said hello and introduced myself and we gabbed for a while about Groton, the weather, and mostly about the Boilermaker. I ran next to him for almost 2 miles, but he’s still recovering from a broken foot, so I kicked ahead after that. Someday, when I’m an old ex-runner, I’ll fib slightly and say I finished the ‘07 Boilermaker 2 minutes ahead of Bill Rodgers.

It was a very tough race. The temperatures climbed from about 80 at the start to near 90 by the time I finished, and the morning cloud cover vanished by mile 3. Except for a steep climb up through a golf course between miles 3 and 4, much of the course is urban and without tree cover. Fabulously, this 15K course included 25 (that’s right TWENTY-FIVE) water stops, most of them passing out cups of ice as well. So, this became a great process of heat regulation. I drank water, poured water over my head, dribbled ice-water on my face, and kept safely cool the whole way, and was able to really race the course. I cannot say enough about the race support: the organizers clearly know that it is a hot race, and they know how to handle it. I can’t imagine trying to get torrents of ice and water into 12,000 runners, but they do it! At every water stop there were dozens of volunteers holding out plenty of water.

OK, enough about running. How does it end? The race ends at Matt’s Brewery in downtown. After gasping and staggering for a few minutes, runners walk into the middle of a huge party, and are immediately greeted by huge cups of really cold, really good beer!! Sunday was the first time since college that I had consumed 2 16-ounce beers before 9:30am. In addition to that, there were sports drinks, sandwiches, cookies, various tubes of sticky “recovery pops”, live bands with mosh pit and beachballs, jumbotron screen, fireworks, a fighter-jet fly-by, and all sorts of carousing. A couple hours later, we limped back to the cars, toting bags of swag (including a nice pint glass) and a few beers for the walk. I stood at a crosswalk next to a couple of cops, who looked at my “open container” and said “how’d you do?”. What a town.

Lest my playful report imply any disrespect, I will close by saying that this race is both a very serious sporting event and complete unparalleled hoot! For $40 and a really bad commute, you can participate in a genuine competition which includes serious elites, and you can see an amazing display of civic pride and organizational execution. If there is any way you can somehow find your way to Utica NY on a sweltering July Sunday morning, do it!!!