Return to in-person racing has a few twists
Organizing an event the size of the Chevron Houston Marathon/ Aramco Half Marathon, with some 28,000 participants, was never simple under the best of circumstances. Now, staging what is arguably the Houston area’s largest annual event in the age of COVID-19, with the omicron variant infecting record numbers of people, presents far greater challenges.
Nonetheless, Wade Morehead, the Chevron Houston Marathon Committee’s executive director, is supremely confident his team and the city’s various cooperating entities have prepared sufficiently to have an exciting, worry-free 50th-anniversary race celebration this weekend. Countless hours have been spent conferring with the various local entities critical to the event’s success and with race officials in other towns who have already navigated their way through these tricky times.
“We’ve been collaborating with city and health officials for months — actually since March of 2020, when we made the decision to pivot to a virtual race in 2021 — and we’ve regularly met with organizers nationally and internationally who have conducted races in the last four to six months,” Morehead said. “We also communicate regularly with venue and sports management operators to discuss trends and best practices needed to host events safely. We’re fortunate that ours is brief — and outdoors.”
But there is, of course, a significant indoor component, with runners convening before and after in the George R. Brown Convention Center staging areas. But Morehead noted the building’s relatively new “state of the art” air filtration system and myriad “mitigation protocols” designed to keep people and others from congregating in close quarters more than is absolutely necessary.
And yes, he said “social distancing” restrictions will be in place Sunday, from the expanded pre-start “corral” areas to the GRB itself. Masking will be strongly encouraged everywhere except on the course.
“We’ll be providing masks at all entry points into the GRB throughout the weekend,” Morehead said, “as well as for those entering the corrals and for runners coming across the finish line.
“But,” he added, regarding the latter, “we’ll give them a chance to catch their breath first.”
Packet pickup has dramatically changed, too, with runners slotted into specific time slots rather than massing all at once. At the Fitness Expo, the stage has been eliminated so there won’t be “any standing around together,” Morehead said. Further, the aisles have been significantly widened “and we’ve separated the space between the vendors to create an airy environment, to make it as safe or more safe than some of the places we visit daily.”
New wrinkles on the familiar course include the start moving one block west to Fannin at Congress — again, to allow for more corral elbow room — and a routing in Memorial Park, where the Marathon was staged in multiple loops from 1972 through 1985, through the new Land Bridge tunnel. Other than work crews, the runners will be the first to traverse the covered roadway, which opens for traffic this spring.
“Our course director has been collaborating with the construction company to make sure everything is safe,” Morehead said. “It’s a great way to tie our history together.”
Along those same lines, longtime Houston-area running coach Dan Green, the Marathon’s inaugural champion, returns to serve as the honorary starter.
The 2020 winners, Ethiopians Askale Merachi and Kelkile Gezahegn, are coming back to defend their titles, and making her seventh consecutive appearance will be three-time champion Biruktayit Eshetu Degefa, who’s attempting to become Houston’s first four-time winner. She was thwarted two years ago, finishing as the runner-up to Merachi.
Top American entries include Keira D’Amato and Houston’s Frank Lara. D’Amato comes to Houston with a personal best of 2:22:56 and could challenge the 10-year-old women’s course record of 2:23:14. Lara, the 2014 Gatorade Boys’ High School Cross Country Runner of the Year when he was attending Strake Jesuit College Prep, returns for his marathon debut, with this race serving as the first qualifier for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials, which has newly toughened standards of 2:18 for men and 2:37 for women.
The Aramco Houston Half Marathon, run concurrently with the marathon, will be led by Kenyan Vicoty Chepngeno and American Sara Hall. Chepngeno established her personal best of 1:07:22 in winning the Philadelphia Half Marathon last November. Hall is the sixth-fastest woman in U.S. history in the half marathon and second-fastest in the marathon. On the men’s side, the fastest time in the field belongs to Shadrack Kimining Korir, who returns after finishing third here in 2020 in a personal-best 59:27.
The elite fields for the two races will feature athletes representing 15 countries other than the U.S.: Kenya, Ethiopia, Mexico, Great Britain, Japan, Bulgaria, Guatemala, Peru, Eritrea, South Africa, Morocco, New Zealand, Canada, Israel and Australia.
The races will be covered live on Channel 13 from 7-10 a.m., with a race day recap at 10:35 p.m. Joining the station’s Greg Bailey and Gina Gaston as expert commentator will be Des Linden, the 2018 Boston Marathon winner and 50K world-record holder. Linden qualified for the first of her two U.S. Olympic Marathon teams in Houston in 2012.
This is Morehead’s 12th Marathon weekend in Houston and arguably the most challenging. But the good, he insists, has far outweighed the bad.
“There are definitely things that we’re learning that will make it a better event in the long run,” he said. “We’re collaborating more closely than ever with other race organizers, seeing and learning what they’ve done that has worked. What we’re hearing from our industry is that races can continue to be conducted safely. We’re very much looking forward to it being a great day in the history of the race and the city.”