On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

On Sunday morning I forgot the San Francisco Marathon was happening. It's easy to do -- there's not much said about it. The primary publicity is of inconvenience more than anything: car travel across the race route would be delayed. My first encounter with watching a marathon was when I lived in the Boston area and watching The Marathon was virtually mandatory on Patriot's Day, the day which marks Massachussetts' emergence from a long, grey, cold winter. The huge number of runners in the race were dwarfed by the number of spectators, with many sections stacked on both sides with cheering viewers. Later I lived in Austin, Texas, and while the marathon there wasn't in the same class as Austin, it was still a popular event, and people would follow the race and cheer the runners all along the fast route. San Francisco, on the other hand, despite providing probably the best terrain for a marathon in the country, treats the race as a necessary evil to be gotten...