You know a road race is a good one when you aren’t in the least bit ready but join in anyway. Say, having trained at most three times a week over just a few recent months, and that at an easy two miles per.
But Sag Harbor’s Jordan’s Run is always worth it — the flags, the vets, the bikers at the sun-splashed bridge to North Haven, behind them bagpipes, and then beyond the pipers, like docked alien craft, the sleek yachts at Long Wharf, signifiers of the otherworldly rich in our midst.
The opening ceremony offered a welcome new addition, a benediction to greet the day and focus your thoughts. Maybe I missed it this year, but what I remember most from last year was the hair-raising, second-by-second recounting of Marine Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter’s last minutes in the face of a suicide bomber at the wheel of a truck barreling in, loaded with explosives.
All the Iraqi Army regulars scramble, dive for cover, as Haerter, 19, and Cpl. Jonathan Yale, a 21-year-old from rural Virginia, stand their ground and start firing. The windshield blows out. They keep firing, emptying their clips. The truck explodes, the compound behind them is spared.
You could say that we should’ve stayed focused on Afghanistan, that Dubya was terribly misled by his advisers in invading Iraq. And you wouldn’t be wrong; even Donald Trump made political hay by pointing that out. But, to understate it by a mile, those two guys were there for their brothers in arms.
Every Sag Harborite should hear that presentation. And if not every American, then, for a dose of perspective, how about those summer folk enraged over having to wait for a table at Sen.
As for the race, when I was 30 years younger and 20 pounds lighter I ran a 5K in 16 minutes and 7 seconds, which would’ve won on Sunday. Now — Snoopy socks, a three-year-old pair of New Balances with a hole where my left big toe goes, silly white baseball cap to protect a head that’s lost more than a few feathers — I was thrilled just to break 27 minutes.
Nothing crucial there, only keeping count.
Same time next year.