I received an odd request from my friend Steve Mattina yesterday afternoon. Did I still have my finisher’s medal from last year’s Okanagan Marathon and could he “borrow it” for a day?
Yes, of course I still had my medal from the 2013 Okanagan Marathon. The medal shows the map of the last year’s double loop course about two-and-a-half inches wide. After years of medals sporting Okanagan staples like apples, grapes or Ogopogos, it was a unique and gutsy design choice considering the race’s history of route changes.
Conveniently, the route for our weekly Wednesday night run would take us from the Broadway Running Room across Burrard Bridge to the Denman store where we would meet up with Steve for the run back. (Yeah, I had planned to deliver it to him at Denman but absent-mindedly left the medal in my bag at the store.)
On the run back to Broadway, Steve explained why he needed the medal. He had received a request for the Okanagan Marathon to contribute a medal to a display of medals from marathons around the world at the AIMS Marathon Museum of Running in Berlin. The hitch was, the race organizers in Kelowna hadn’t located the extra medals from last year and Steve was heading to England the next day to run the Rock ‘n’ Roll Liverpool Half Marathon this weekend en route to South Africa to run Comrades the following weekend. I was the one guy in town he could think of who probably had a medal and, more importantly, could get it to him before he departed. And so I did.
Farewell Marathon Medal #28! Don’t forget to send a postcard from Germany!