My first marathon, a fast 5K run, and a few birds to boot!

The last few days were pretty eventful. I found two bird species I had never seen before, and achieved two personal goals in physical fitness training.

I finally managed to run a five kilometer race in less than 18 minutes (17 minutes, 46 seconds), and three days later I ran the Camp Buehring Annual Marathon – 26.2 miles! It is the farthest I have ever run in my life, and it turned out to be much more of a challenge than I had expected. The fastest runner here is a US Navy pilot. Those guys aren’t normal people; it must come from doing to many handstands… Since he runs a five kilometer race about thirty seconds faster than I do, I thought I’d try to keep up with him as long as I could during the marathon, but my strategy backfired. He let me pass him about one mile into the race, and ran right behind me for the first eighteen miles or so. Then he passed me and flew to a first place win in almost exactly three hours. Right around the twentieth mile I slowed down drastically. I felt like my legs were going to fall right off, and I limped into second place in three hours, fifteen minutes and ten seconds. It turned out that the Navy pilot had been using me as a pacer. He had a GPS watch on and realized that I was running a 6:40 minute per mile pace. When he realized that I had started to slow down, he just moved out and passed relay runners to stay motivated. He had run marathons before, and knew about strategy, training and so on. As for me, I didn’t realize until about halfway through that it was okay to make time for a drink of water, or that I couldn’t sustain my pace for very long.

I had expected a run of over three hours to be very boring, but it wasn’t so bad. All the runners were courteous in spite of their obvious physical distress; we would systematically encourage each other, exchange a few words, and thank the support people who tried to hand us bottles of water and Gatorade.


There were also interesting birds along the way. I saw lots of wheatears, a common whitethroat, a few swallows, a woodchat shrike (I took this picture two days ago), a few isabelline shrikes, some squacco herons, a saker falcon trying to kill a crested lark, and some stonechats. At the finish line I looked up and said to sergeant Metcalfe who was there to take pictures “look sergeant; there’s a heron.” Then I thought: “wait! It might be a purple heron, but it looks weird.” The bird got closer, and closer, and turned out to be a bittern! For those of you non-birdwatchers, a bittern is a very cool, cryptic and rather scarce heron with short legs. Bitterns usually stay inside reed beds, and many people who hear their booming calls on a regular basis have never seen one.

What impressed me the most about the marathon (my first race over five kilometer) was the very small number of people who attempted the race (about forty including relay teams), versus the sheer number of people who could have run it but didn’t. I had gotten sick of hearing the old cliché “everyone who finishes is a winner,” but now I think that even the people who tried and gave up deserve just as much respect as the Navy pilot who completed the run and won.

As for the two species of birds I saw for the first time, I was unfortunately unable to take pictures of them. I saw a male rock thrush while on patrol, and some red-throated pipits. I had thought that finding red-throated pipits would be a challenge - in fact, the challenge was finding my first red-throated pipit. It turns out that the red-throated pipit has a very distinctive, loud "tseet" call. Once I saw and heard my first one, I was hearing and seeing them every few hours. Also, the red throat is obvious and unmistakable in this time of the year.