— Editor's Roundup —
USDA people in the news

USDA’s 105,000-plus employees include at least a handful of runners who have participated in marathons across the country. But that number grows ever smaller when it narrows to those who have participated in marathons overseas.

Sonia Jacobsen makes that elite cut, however--and has a tale to tell about how she learned, firsthand, of the differences in marathons held on different continents.

Jacobsen, a hydraulic engineer with the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s State Office in St. Paul, Minn., recently journeyed to Ireland to run in the Dublin City Marathon.

Cutting to the chase--literally--Jacobsen finished with a time of three hours and 52 minutes. “I was the first Minnesotan, twelfth in my age category, and no doubt the first and only USDA employee to cross the finish line,” she quipped.

But her tale of that 26.2 mile journey, throughout Dublin, includes these observations.

“Running an international marathon,” Jacobsen noted, “introduced me to cobblestone streets and sports drinks--one of which tasted like a combination of orange Gatorade and orange Tang--that aren’t known in the U.S.” Aid stations were every three to four miles--unlike marathons in America that tend to have aid stations every one to two miles.

“In the U.S.,” she said, “water and sports drinks are provided in paper cups. But in the Dublin marathon, at each aid station runners could grab a bottle of water or a pouch of a sports drink, and both forms of beverage had screw-on caps to seal them.”

That ended up proving significant. Many runners would typically grab a bottle or pouch, drink only some of the beverage, then seal the container and toss it to the curb. “I later learned,” Jacobsen said, “that, by the six-hour mark in the race, while I was recovering back at my hotel, runners still participating encountered aid stations that had closed, since they had run out of water.”

“So,” she related, “my teammates and others picked up, off the ground, some of those partially filled but discarded beverage containers and then used those as a substitute measure--as their only source of refreshment.”

But by the seven-hour mark in the race, the situation had become critical. “So some of the race coaches, realizing the potential health problem for runners who still hadn’t finished, hurriedly convinced local businesses to lend them a table, set it up between mile 21 and 22, bought as much water and sports drinks as they could from local merchants, and then provided the liquids to every runner still on the course.”

“At the end of the marathon all participants were handed a cardboard box with a plaque inside,” she said. “That’s not how it’s normally done at a U.S. marathon, where finishers normally have a medal placed around the neck--so that just added to the uniqueness of this experience.”•