I inadvertently signed up to run two races last weekend: the first race being the marathon that follows the New Jersy coastline north from Cape May to Sea Isle City. The second race was to the airport.

Normally marathons start somewhere between 0630 and 0730, and I had booked our return flight months ago from Philadelphia for 1345, thinking I'd have plenty of time to run the race, shower, and make our leisurely way from the New Jersey coast to the Philadelphia airport.

It wasn't until Friday when I re-checked the race web site that I noticed that the race start time was set for 0900. A quick check of mapquest.com showed that the time required to drive from the race ending point in Sea Isle City, NJ to the Philly airport would be 1 hour 18 minutes. Yikes! That meant that if I ran a 3 hour marathon, immediately jumped into the car and raced to the airport I'd have approximately twenty minutes to turn in the rental car, ride the shuttle to the airport, make it through security, and dash to the gate before the flight closed ten minutes before take off. To make a long story short, that's exactly what we did. I ran a 3:02 marathon, and was speeding along the turnpike less than five minutes later. We pulled into the rental car dropoff area after 1 hour 8 minutes driving time, just made the shuttle as it pulled out, dashed to security (we had printed our boarding passes the day before) where for the first time in memory there was NO LINE--what luck! I had separated the problem items that normally catch me, like coins and bottle openers, and we sailed through easily. As we approached the gate, a mere 100 yards further, we heard with relief "This is the final boarding call for flight 5646 to St Louis".