If you ever need some inspiration, volunteer to hand out water at a marathon. I got an email from Jane Roos looking for volunteers for their Toronto Marathon water station. Jane heads the Canadian Athletes Now Fund (formerly "See You In..." - see Feb. 6 2006 in the archives) which has supported most of the canoe-kayak team at some point. I've been saying I'd help out at some event for a while and felt it was time to actually do something. I put a note about it on Facebook and Richard Steinhardt said he'd be there too.
No lie, when my alarm went off at 6:30am I was shaking my head as in "what was I thinking?" but when we got down there - it was so much fun! CANF's water station was at the Hilton at University and Richmond. It was the last one for the each of the distances; 5k, half and full marathon. The 40km mark. You can imagine what the marathoners were like by the time they got to us. It was awesome. Jane had a DJ blasting techno so people really perked up when they got to us. Richard was a superstar and never once complained about the early wake-up call or the 6 hours he put in out in the wind and cold.
There were issues at the beginning, the water had been delivered but we didn't have tables or Gatorade or cups. And when they did deliver the cups, we only got about 3,000. There were approximately 7,000 runners so we ended up scrounging coffee cups from the Second Cup. Eventually a bike marshall came by with another box of gatorade cups and by the time the last runner went by we had only a handful left... Jane kept us going with croissants and hot chocolate throughout but there wasn't a lot of time for breaks between mixing gatorade, pouring, setting them up and handing out cups. The best job was definitely being out on the road with the runners, handing out the liquids. They were all so pumped.
Even though I basically stood in one place all day I felt like I had done a workout. Watching other people run 42km is strangely energizing (but not in a way that made me want to actually run the 42km)!
The fund runs a ton of events so if you're interested in being involved some time just let me know!