New York City Marathon Expo

48 hours to go to the start of the New York City Marathon, and I have caught the bug! No, I’m not sick, although my wife and Katie (my 8 year old) are.  I think they got sick from me, so I’m safe!  The bug I’ve caught is the super excitement of what may be the greatest mass participation sporting event out there!  The city is really transforming this week into marathon mode, and yesterday I headed to the expo to take part!

On a side note, when I checked my RSS feed this morning, I *already* had 4 completed marathon expo reports!  Wow, I’m behind the times!  Check out their great blogs…

• Brooklyn Running
• A Marathoner
• Running Fool
• Run Dangerously

Don’t have time to go into full details, but I had a lot of fun.  The only complaint that I do have about it (its human nature to complain about something, right!) is that the exhibition space is relatively small (the Austin Marathon exhibition space was almost as big), with much of the space is taken up by the big name vendors, Asics, Nike, Foot Locker, Garmin, Timex, Polar, Saucony, Poland Spring, Gatorade, and so on.  There were not a whole lot of the smaller vendors with more interesting items.  Yes, there were some, but just not enough!  I think that is why I liked the Austin Marathon expo so much, because there was a greater mix of bigger vendors and smaller vendors.  Here, many of the smaller vendors were actually a subset of the large Paragon section.

Anyway, expo really was great overall, and I picked up lots of stuff, including:

• tech tee
• White cap
• Heavy gloves
• singlet
• long sleeve under layer
• throwaway jacket
• light gloves
• Amphipod
• Socks

In short, I went hog wild!  Here are the pictures I got on my phone:

Lifesize Asics map of the course

Full Asics list of Hello Goodbye

My bag of stuff

Grete signing autographs

My favorite ‘swag’ item is the Timex refrigerator magnet where you can punch out the pieces of a digital clock grid to show your finishing time, just like a real digital race clock! 

In all, spent about 2 hours wandering around, very tiring work.  Was also able to meet up with Michelle and chat for a few minutes.

Can’t wait for Sunday and will try and write up some final thoughts beforehand.