Country Music Marathon Expo

We made it back yesterday from our weekend at the Country Music Marathon in Nashville. It was a good, tough weekend. I wanted to take the next week to review a few aspects of the race festivities. Since there is no better place to start than at the beginning, I will begin with the Race Expo on Friday.

The Expo was held at the Nashville Convention Center just off the downtown Broadway Street area and right across from the Ryman Auditorium. My wife and I decided to head up there early to avoid the bulk of the crowds, and we were glad that we did. We arrived not long after they opened at 11 a.m. and found no real lines to speak of. From the way the Convention Center was set up, you could tell of what was to come later in the day, with over 30,000 runners and 50,000 total visitors expected. They had plenty of security and event personnel on site ready to help and had the entrance weaving around to manage the expected crowds.

Once you entered to hall, there was a large area just for receiving your race number. There was an area for chip solutions and changing your corrals (although on race day this was useless). From there you proceed to the next station to pick up your event t-shirts, half-marathoners to one side and full-marathoners to the other. Next, you picked up your race bag/packet and headed off to the largest single-purpose area in the exhibit hall…The Official Merchandise Zone. We looked around for a little bit, but everything was way overpriced and a little too self-indulgent for a low-key guy like me. Besides, I’ll just wait until after the event when they mark everything down on the web site.

Finally, we moved along into the vendor area. This put my, most recent, first marathon expo to shame. My first marathon expo was held on the ground floor of the local Hilton Garden Inn in Albany, GA. With a higher caliber event, there comes a higher caliber expo. Just about every major shoe and clothing manufacturer was present, including Asics, Brooks, New Balance, Mizuno, Sugio, 2XU, etc. There were also numbers of vendors selling discounted clothing, nutritional products, running accessories and everything else under the sun. We ingested our fill of the samples, got some cards and flyers for items I want to check out online when we got home, and slowly meandered our way through the maze. All in all, there was little I couldn’t live without.

We made our way towards the exits and headed to Broadway to eat at a Bar-B-Q place there called Jack’s that a friend recommended. It was very good, as we should have known by the long line to get in the place. Without our bellies full and our feet tired, we went back to where we were staying to cat nap and watch some NFL draft previews.

Graphics from www.cmmarathon.com