Rome Marathon

Last Sunday was the Rome Marathon. Always interested in seeing something new, we headed down to the race to cheer on the participants.

The race route is pretty amazing, passing almost every major Rome attraction and starting and ending at the Colosseum. From what I could tell as a spectator - the majority of fans cheering on the runners are tourists, and many of the runners seemed to not be locals. The cobblestones did appear to present a problem for some, but not all of the runners. (We did see one guy without his shoes on). At the same time, it looked like there were a lot of runners that were treating this as a "fun" run and weren't a bit concerned about the pavement. (We crossed several runner at about 13 km when the winners were passing 40 kms). Probably the biggest challenge for the runners was the wind. The temperature was nice and cool, but the wind was very strong - even pushing over one of the metal barriers. (Fortunately it fell into the course when no one was running down our stretch and did not injure anyone).

We stood at about the 39 km point to cheer on the runners. (Somewhat near the Mouth of Truth). This was a rather light area for fans and we were able to see very well from this spot. Plus, it was an easy spot to get to from Trastevere. From here we were able to cheer on the top female finishers (we just missed the men), the top wheelchair athletes, and the first runner with double prothetics.

Here are a few photos of the runners, and our little group of spectators... (The pictures are...(1) Kids watching the race in comfort & style, (2) 2nd and 3rd women that went by us...I was too slow with the camera to get the first woman. (3) I think this may have been the first Italian woman. She was getting a lot of attention. (4) First chair athletes going too fast around the corner and past us to get a shot from the front, (5) First runner with double prosthetics.

Unfortunately we weren't able to stay for the characters that you usually see in marathons (I am expecting there were a couple Roman Gladiators). We had to get to mass and could only stick around for about an hour. But we still had a lot of fun.