Early this past Saturday morning, SWMBO and I went walking around Kapiolani Park. This is part of our regular routine and something we enjoy because you have the beauty of the park and the calm Pacific Ocean in one short three mile loop. However, perhaps this was not the wisest thing to do on this particular Saturday morning because this is the finish line for the famed Honolulu Marathon. Of course, the race is held the next day but even on Saturday, there are hundreds of people out for a run.
People from 48 of the 50 United States and over 40 countries (especially from Japan and Canada) came to run 26.2 miles (about 42km). Twenty-eight thousand people signed up to run and about 25,000 actually arrived at the early morning start line. Of those 25,000, all except about 380 completed the run. That is a phenomenal 98 percent completion rate! That is so high I have to wonder about the accuracy of the numbers reported in the MorningPaper but that's what they have.
For trivia buffs, the Honolulu Marathon is sometimes referred to as the people's marathon because everyone is welcome and the finish line is not shut down until the last runner finishes. Even if it takes 14 hours and nineteen minutes, as it did for the last two people to finish yesterday.
For all that, what I noticed on Saturday was that one of the runners, who may have been a Japanese national although I could be wrong on that, carried a trash bag with him and was picking up rubbish as he went along. I think local people should be ashamed that it takes someone from Japan to come here to pick up our own rubbish. We live in such a beautiful state but some residents seem to think public spaces are their own private trash bin. Shame on them and arigato gozaimas to the gentleman who by his actions was doing more than his part to make things a little better.
Aloha!
