Move over, Green Bay Marathon. The Grandma's Marathon has the best post-race party. The free food is still better in Green Bay, but Grandma's trumps them in every other category. What was a close call for post-race beer back before the CGBM organizers bent over for Miller became a wash-out when Grandma's used the Budweiser connection to have Goose Island at the party. Second, the bands were fast and furious all day in terms of quantity and the quality was off the charts. If it wasn't for having to get our car, we probably would have stayed until we had to go home. If we did that, we probably would have partied until my uncle couldn't feel his hamstring pull anymore. It definitely made us regret not getting a second night at the area hotels.

WHAT WASN'T SO AWESOME ABOUT THIS RACE

The Pre-Race and Post-Race areas were kind of crappy in terms of layout. Let's start at the start. Our gear check was on the road where we were dropped off, accessed the porta-potties, and lined up for the race. That's a lot of action going on, which resulted in a deadlock in the waning moments before the race. In addition, the Grandma's Marathon suffers from what usually happens when you have a point-to-point race. You have this awesome, amazing finish line waiting and you know you have 26.2 miles to get there. Unlike Boston where you start in the downtown area of Hopkinton, we started behind a car dealership. I think a lot of people ran faster just to get out of there. The finish line area post-race was also poorly placed as we didn't know where to get food, where to get our gear check bags, etc.

For more, check out my blog entry: http://tkmarathonman.blogspot.com/2013/06/race-report-grandmas-marathon.html

Link to this review