Don Marino has seen runners gather at the Boilermaker Road Race starting line for 29 years and has seen crowds and change, but the love for the race still stays the same.
As a start line coordinator, Marino’s job is to keep everything running smoothly before the runners line up in the corrals.
The size of the crowd had been an issue for a while, but Marino said they’ve seemed to start peak. “I remember just after COVID-19, we peaked at around 14,000 and let me tell you, that got unwieldy,” he said with a laugh.
Marino said over the years, what’s made his job easier are the new businesses that have come to call the area around Dwyer Avenue home. Specifically, Nimey’s New Generation Cars and the Starting Line Apartments has stopped a problem his team had for years.
“The starting line used to have two vacant fields, and everyone would congregate in those fields,” Marino said. “And they’d end up tearing down the plastic snow fences, and we couldn’t get the runners into their proper corrals a few minutes before the race because you just couldn’t control the crowd.”
And controlling the crowds is important, since anything and everything can happen at the Boilermaker.
Strange happenings
Over the years, Marino has witnessed numerous strange, amusing, and concerning incidents at the race. This year, he was more than surprised when the call came in that a runner had been hit by a deer.
“Usually, it’s the other way around,” Marino said with a chuckle. “This is like ‘person bites dog.’”
At the top of the golf course, Ana Peckham, of Madison, witnessed a runner get hit by a deer at the top of the golf course.
“She was apparently hurt because people were tending to her and medics rushed over,” Peckham said. “You don’t just expect deer to jump out. That was crazy.”
Among other race memories, Marino said that around 11 years ago, a car managed to slip through the barricades 30 minutes before the race.
“They were going north on Culver Avenue, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a car coming through. The corrals weren’t completely full of runners, and then all of a sudden, people started moving,” Marino explained. It wasn’t someone trying to hurt racers, but instead someone who Marino felt was lost.
On a funnier note, Marino said Timothy Julian almost didn’t give his pre-race speech. Serving from 2000 to 2007, then-mayor Julian was participating in the Boilermaker and trying to make his way to the podium before the race.
“Word got up to me that someone was trying to come up through the corrals that didn’t have the right bib number and weren’t qualified to be with the elite runners,” Marino said. “And that they were saying they were the mayor.”
Marino showed up to see just what was happening and sure enough, Julian had been stopped.
“They said to me, ‘He’s claiming to be the mayor’,” Marino said with a laugh. “And I say, ‘Well, he is the mayor.’”
Marino said Julian held no ill will and the Boilermaker race volunteers were just doing their job.
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Boilermaker start line coordinator looks back at past races
Reporting by Casey Pritchard, Utica Observer Dispatch / Observer-Dispatch
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