I ran this race a couple of weekends ago as my 39th marathon distance race. This ended up being a nice small town marathon even if much of the course was quite boring. The start of this race is about ½ mile away from the finish and they have free parking all the way in-between which ends up being really nice. The race itself was a mostly flat course that went from the bandstand near the beach to the state park just north of town, back through a residential area to another path and finally back to the area near the beach. I would say that about ¾ of it was on hard packed trails that sometimes had pine needles on them. My biggest complaint for this race is that it was pretty boring. I came to the race not expecting much crowd support but at least some scenery and while the crowd support part rang mostly true, there wasn’t much scenery either. Oh well, it was flat and a December marathon which I appreciated. The best part of the race actually ended up being the after party which was really awesome. The spread that they put out for the runners consisted of fruit, sausage, bacon, pancakes, ham bbq sandwiches, hamburgers, hot dogs and a couple of different kinds of beer! I don’t know that I would call this a destination marathon but I would say that if you want a nice no frills or hills race with a great after party then this is your race.
