Bucket List of an Idiot by Dom Harvey

Author:Dom Harvey [Harvey, Dom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: book, General, Biography & Autobiography, Humor, Personal Memoirs, HUM000000
ISBN: 9781877505171
Google: Y9gfz0R_knYC
Amazon: 187750517X
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-03-31T11:00:00+00:00

The Boston Marathon is held on the same day every year. It is a holiday called Patriots’ Day and falls on the third Monday of April. It has to be on a holiday because every single yellow school bus available is required to transport the runners to the tiny town of Hopkinton, twenty-six miles away, where the run starts.

The sight of maybe sixty or seventy of those big chunky yellow school buses all lined up got me a little excited. I’m not sure why—it’s just a stupid bus, after all. I suppose it’s because we see them on telly and in movies all the time and they don’t look anything like the buses we have back home. Still, pretty lame on my part. I should have edited the confession about the buses out before submitting this manuscript to the publishers.

The bus trip from Boston to the start line seems to take forever and does nothing to calm the nerves—all it does is reinforce just how far you have to run to get back to Boston!

The bus drops you off at the grounds of Hopkinton High School, which is transformed into an athletes’ village for the day.

I arrived in the athletes’ village and waited. I waited for ages. As you can probably imagine, it is a logistical nightmare shuttling 20,000 people from the finish line out to the start line, so the race organisers get everybody there with plenty of time to spare. I was on the bus by 6.20 am and made it to the athletes’ village just after 7 am, even though the race didn’t start until 10.

The morning of the run was bloody freezing. Just brutally cold. I’d checked the forecast the day before and knew it was going to be gnarly, so I dressed accordingly (gloves, beanie and a hooded sweatshirt). Even with all these layers on, I was still underdressed and unbelievably cold.

I found a near-empty 44-gallon rubbish drum with one of those plastic bin liners in. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I hand-picked the half-a-dozen bits of rubbish out and used it as a sort of makeshift sleeping bag. Even that bag did little to stop my relentless shivering. It did, however, mean I could keep my hands warm by putting them down my pants without anyone else seeing I had my hands down my pants. Bonus!

It was easy to spot those who had run Boston before—people had magazines and newspapers to help pass the hours. Others had actual sleeping bags.

Eventually the sun came up, but because the athletes’ village was in the grounds of a high school there were two-storey buildings everywhere which did a fantastic job of blocking out the sun’s warmth. There was one sunny spot on the field, which was well used by me and thousands of other runners who had not anticipated it would be such a bloody miserable morning.

Half an hour before the race was due to start, an announcement was made telling us to leave the athletes’ village and walk to the start line, which was about 600 metres away.

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