Race
The ING Miami Marathon is open to all runners, male and female, from any nation, and is an official Boston Marathon qualifier.
The 42.195-kilometre (26.219 mi) race is typically run on the last Sunday in late January or the first Sunday in early February, at approximately 6:10am. The Miami Half Marathon, a 21.075-kilometre (13.095 mi) race, is started concurrently. A wheelchair division of the marathon begins 5–10 minutes before the footrace.
Celebrities or local politicians typically start the race. The legendary Frank Shorter, Olympic marathon gold medalist in 1972, and Ryan Hall, winner of the 2008 United States Olympic Trials, have been given this honor.
Beginning on Biscayne Boulevard next to the American Airlines Arena (home of the Miami Heat), the course takes runners eastbound on the MacArthur Causeway, past cruise ships docked at the Port of Miami, to South Beach. From there, competitors travel northbound along the famous Ocean Drive, through the City of Miami Beach, and then westbound along the Venetian Causeway and back to the mainland and the City of Miami. Here, the Miami Half Marathon finishes and the full marathon continues southbound through the financial district, Brickell, into Coconut Grove, out the Rickenbacker Causeway towards Key Biscayne, and then back through Brickell and downtown Miami to complete the 42.195 kilometres (26.219 mi) at Bayfront Park.
The race has been growing over the years. In 2010, 18,321 runners took part in the combined races. For the 2011 event, registrations increased by 20 percent.
The average temperature at the start of the race for the years 2003-2007 was 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit (17.4 degrees Celsius).
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Famous quotes containing the word race:
“These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Let me live in my house by the side of the road—
It’s here the race of men go by.
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong
Wise, foolish—so am I;”
—Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911)