Racing Bollinger, tackling Fun Run one last time

Freshman year, I skipped President Bollinger’s Fun Run. I waited to sign up until it was too late, and I was too young to realize that an event that took place at 8:30 a.m. would have a healthy contingent of no-shows. Sophomore year, I slept. Junior year, I signed up and then overslept after at most three hours of shut-eye, and started late. This year, I got there on time. But this year, I failed to sleep at all.

It turns out that the Fun Run always coincides with very late nights in the Spectator office, and this year was no exception. It was dawn when I left on Friday morning—too late to get any reasonable amount of sleep—and despite having consumed all kinds of poor warm-up food (vending machines do not sell bananas), I was determined to race.

Some kids were arguing beforehand about PrezBo’s speed. One scoffed, saying he thought Bollinger ran about a 12-minute mile. He’s 64 years old. Is that really worthy of mockery?

But PrezBo seemed in on the joke—before the race, he said via megaphone that this event makes him feel old, even though it reminds him of the joys of youth.

Not for a second did I think this run would go well. Rest is a critical component of all things exercise. Beating PrezBo would be satisfaction enough, I thought. Strategically, I started well back in the pack—I figured that passing people ahead of me would provide regular jolts of adrenaline. That it did. But I never passed PrezBo.

Or so I thought. I gave it everything I had, but he never came into sight. When I expressed frustration to Yipeng Huang, our amiable staff director and a runner far superior to myself, he insisted PrezBo had yet to finish. Turns out I had passed him in a pack near the beginning and failed to notice.

Oh. So I can thank him for pushing me, if nothing else. If I’d realized a monumental victory over the president was already in the offing, I might have fallen asleep on the course. Instead I beat him, but with satisfaction only arriving after the fact. A bit anticlimactic.

We did get to chat for a few minutes afterward. He claimed that asking if he felt good was an unfair question. Again, he’s 64 and he finished a 5K—that seems to speak for itself. And he still usually runs six times a week, he said.

That was that. I got my free T-shirt on College Walk. There was no food or water down in the park by the finish line, so I headed to Ferris Booth Commons for a breakfast that finally came from somewhere other than a vending machine. I reflected on my storied Fun Run history—and how sleep always seemed to conspire against it.

It is a worthy Columbia memory, I determined. And there’s really nothing stopping me from showing up again and running as a bandit, sans bib. I won’t be responsible for Spectator production, so I could even sleep beforehand. In other words, see you next year.