I don’t think you can become an outstanding runner unless you get a certain amount of enjoyment out of the suffering.
You have to enjoy absorbing it, controlling it, and – ultimately – overcoming it. – Derek Clayton
The Honolulu Marathon is like a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.
You always know what you are going to get.
To be perfectly honest, my pre-race strategy fell by the wayside the moment I saw this huge limousine driver holding up a sign.
Sign had
MARATHON WELCOMES DEREK CLAYTON
written on it.
Right then I decided to tell everybody I’m Derek Clayton.
“Aloha,” I say, in what I imagine was an Aussie accent. Clayton comes from Australia.
“Mista Crayton?” He looks like a U.P.S. delivery van in a double-breasted tuxedo.
“Mista Delleck Crayton?”
There is this gorgeous petite Polynesian princess with him in a grass skirt with a couple of coconuts, half shells, covering her, um, coconuts.
Looks like Rae Dawn Chong on her best day.
A banana in her hair.
A thought blew through my brain.
Like out one ear and in the other.
You know what I mean.
I imagine I’d get some real special treatment if they catered to me like I was a great runner, a retired superstar who, it is said, once got suspended for taking three hundred bucks for a world record performance.
Paid his own way, predicted a two-oh-eight and proceeded to run the son of a gun.
“Are you Mista Delleck Crayton?,” he asked me.
“You bet, mate.”
Fruit Salad Woman swished his fronds over to me.
She lifted her arms around my head and rung my neck with a odiferous orchid lei.
One hot pistil, she smelled good, too.
She gave me a kiss on both cheeks.
A trifle young but sweet.
Then she stuck her tongue deep into my mouth
and squeezed my buns.
I gazed down.
What the hell,
I checked her coconuts.
“The way to approach a marathon in a climate like this,” said one of the sport’s more cerebral athletes, “is to take it easy at the start.” No great insight there, but just try keeping your head when people all about aren’t keeping theirs.
What follows is an actual excerpt from an actual letter to the editor of Running Times.
When last we spoke – you never call, you never write – you wanted to know what “angle” I proposed for Honolulu.
Golly. It’s bigger than NYC, with twice as many foreign runners. Heck, it’s the largest Japanese race in the world. It’s famed as the Kenyans’ debutante ball.
“A good place to start a career. If I am to do only one marathon each year,” Mbarak Hussein, who does only one, said, “I do Honolulu.” Unconfirmed rumors have Delillah Asiago running. (Trying to confirm this nearly impossible. Believe me, I’ve tried.)
Carla Beurskens going for her umpteenth consecutive crown. Likely both won’t happen. The inaugural Waikiki Mile was Marc Davis’ best race of the year. Mrs. Slaney rumored to be running this year. Angle? Trust me, I’m a writer.
And of course there’s the matter of future features. I can’t seem to find my list of great ideas previously ignored or rejected. Your silence makes it difficult to know which. I guess if they really were great, I’d have heard.