Tirana Marathon & Half-Marathon

Yesterday, October 25th, was the Tirana Marathon & Half-Marathon here in lovely Tirana. I would have mentioned this sooner excepting that nobody knew about it until five days ago when, literally, a handful of posters were put up in the park here. Thankfully, most runners run in the park, so when somebody from my running group saw the sign, the email went around.

No registration fee, no goody-bag, no kilometer markers (21 for half, 42 for full), no timing chips, none of the things you typically expect from races of such distances. The only thing approaching normal was that we got shirts, but these resembled very basic white cotton shirts, with the back reading “Maratona e Tiranes – Nene Tereza – 2009,” and the front of the shirt had your bib number printed on it. No normal bib, so when I wear this in the future, I will forever be number 28.

With 48 hours notice, I decided to gamble on the half. There were maybe 60 people running and at least 50 of those were for the half. I would be surprised if the full marathon even had 10 people running. I have the feeling that this may have been tied into the mental challenge as much as the physical. You see, the half-marathon did one lap through the center of the city (maybe 3 kilometers), and than proceeded to lap through the park 6/7/8 times (more on those numbers later). This means that the marathon was around 15 laps. First off, that is unbelievably tedious. Second, the lap begins with this winding, steep hill that goes on for about a third of the lap distance. Oy, it was killing me and many others, I can’t imagine doubling the number of times on that hill. The water station was at the lap point and was just a handful of people with cups of water, which was actually sufficient with the low number of runners.

At that same point was where they counted your laps. The problem here is that their method of tracking your laps is just a handful of people, sometimes paying attention and sometimes not, trying to mark down the number on your shirt and which lap they think it is. But when you have a couple different people doing this and they are distracted, you get discrepancies on the number of laps. So a number of people did 7 laps – the correct number, a number of people did 6 laps – one lap short, and I heard of one person stuck doing 8. It seems easy enough to keep track in your mind though, right? So if you’ve done 6 and they say you’ve finished, you say no, I have one more. Well it is easy to keep track and everyone did, but nobody knew how many laps we were supposed to do. When people signed up, they heard anything ranging from 4 to 8, and on the day of the race, everyone heard 6.5. How do you do a half-lap? Nobody knew. So nobody knew if 6 or 7 was the most accurate, and so we all just stopped whenever we were told that we were done. And for those of you thinking that we could have maped out the loop ahead of time, nobody knew what the loop was going to be. Originally, the course was from Mother Teresa Square to Skanderbeg Square to the train station, and then back, and this was to be the loop – no park. Then it become that loop one time, and than some number of loops in the park, but nobody knew where the loop in the park was supposed to be. And the morning of the race, the police decided they couldn’t block traffic to the train station, so the street portion was truncated further.

Sadly, I only got to do 6 laps. So technically, I didn’t even finish my first half-marathon! I thought I did, the “officials” said I did, but I mapped it all later and I was 3 kilometers short. Alas. Still, I have to say that as unorganized as it all was, it was fun to have something going on in Tirana and when it comes around again next year, I’ll make sure I get in my full number of laps. I’ll do an extra one to be safe. Only in Albania, right?