No matter how non-competitive we purport to be, a running group attracts a fair amount of crazies who take running seriously and they end up running in official street races.

As a group we want to support even these deviant individuals. However, being the audience in a street race is almost as boring as being the audience in a bicycle race (basically the same, only faster). You stand at the curb, you wait a long time until the front runners run past, you clap and cheer, and then you wait an inordinate amount of time until your friends run, walk or limp past. You clap and cheer and possibly jeer. And the excitement is over in less than two minutes. Then you either go home or you move towards the finish where you find your friends, console them and take them home. As I said: boring.

We decided that was just not us. We formed a PuB team (that’s “Pompom & Beer” although we are not adverse to any associations with literal pubs), dressed up, armed ourselves with lots of noise makers and nutritional supplements (i.e. beer) and devised a cunning plan so that we could see our friends at least three times on the road of the Frankfurt Halfmarathon by cleverly navigating between various locations.

And then we decided not to stand around being bored and freezing while waiting for our friends – we started to cheer everybody. The runners carried their first names on their numbers and how we cheered for Rebecca and Beate and Gert and Ingo and all those other runners we didn’t know! And they loved it! Particularly the slower runners for whom it was all about participating smiled back, they clapped for us, some even did little capers. After the race we were approached by a couple of runners who thanked us and told us that our support had nudged them on.

And we enjoyed ourselves so much that we have since cheered at the Frankfurt Marathon and the Frankfurt Iron Man. The latter was particularly fun because many competitors displayed their nationality and we became truly international. To this day I can cheer in Hebrew!

The photos are all from our first outing at the Frankfurt Halfmarathon in 2017.

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The Ragtag Daily Prompt: Marathon