Country Music Half-Marathon 2009 Retrospective

Adkinson Shocks Half-Marathon Crowd With Personal Best Time

Heat derails amateur scientist’s recovery research, prompts visions of Porter Wagoner

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (April 28, 2009)—Public relations guy, amateur scientist and very-occasional runner Tom Adkinson surprised the field of almost 23,000 runners in Saturday’s Country Music Half-Marathon by setting a personal best of 2 hours 32 minutes.

“My group got to the starting line about 7:45 a.m., and I got behind a really nice guy carrying a sign that said ‘2:30.’ I thought that meant we’d cross the finish line at 2:30 p.m. To my amazement, his intention was to run the whole 13.1 miles in 2 hours 30 minutes,” the red-faced, salt-deprived Adkinson gasped at the end.

His time of 2:32:00 shaved a whopping 10 minutes off his previous record but left unresolved the question of when a number begins to “whop.” The previous record came in the same race two years ago.

“This was only the second one of these silly races I’ve been in, so I knew one of them would be my personal best,” Adkinson said, noting that Jimmy Buffett on his iPod carried him through the first half of the race and the mesmerizing motion of a young female runner in very short University of Tennessee running shorts kept him going from miles 8 through 11.

The 22,749 runners in the half-marathon and another 4,122 in the companion full marathon (26.2 miles) had to cope with a veritable heat wave. Temperatures were above 70 as runners started and into the 80s as they finished.

As Adkinson had predicted, “some guy from Kenya” won the full marathon with a time of 2:13:41.

Adkinson’s run was sponsored in part by B.A.R., Beer and Advil Research, a group Adkinson said will organize officially someday.

“Our research project was to study the beneficial effects of copious amounts of beer and Advil for the occasional runner. Heat-related stomach cramps derailed that plan, but I’ll at least get to the beer part of the research soon enough,” Adkinson said.

Adkinson drew an amused mix of media and onlookers to a post-race news conference he scheduled next to a long row of port-a-johns.

“He seemed sort of loopy, but his norm is so off-base that it was difficult to tell whether anything really was wrong,” said one reporter over the noise of slamming port-a-john doors.

At the news conference, Adkinson seemed to channel Grand Ole Opry great Porter Wagoner (“I’ve enjoyed as much of this as I can stand”) and then professional boxer Roberto Duran (“No mas, no mas”).

The “no mas” comment made reporters wonder about Adkinson’s plans for the 2010 race. However, a female runner in very short UT running shorts strolled by, and the press corps turned its attention there.

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