We’ve all encountered various delays on race days, but a marathon held over the weekend took more than 200 runners’ race paces entirely off the rails—pun intended.
More than 4,000 runners hit the streets for the 26th annual Quad Cities Marathon in Moline, Illinois, but at Modern Woodman Park in Davenport, Iowa, runners had to wait for a freight train to pass by on Gaines Street, causing a significant delay for participants.
“What happened was what we were afraid would happen, and that is a train would come,” race director Joe Moreno told WQAD.
According to Moreno, his team communicates with the Canadian Pacific Railway annually to plan for train delays during the marathon. However, this year, the message was not received.
“It’s very frustrating. It just puts a blemish and cloud over the great success we had yesterday. It was a wonderful day. It didn’t rain on us, everybody had a good time, and everything was well organized,” Moreno said. “I’m so proud of our team, but yet this happens, and that is something we can’t control. We have no control over the railroad trains...what we can control, we handled it with precision.”
This isn’t the first time a train has derailed the marathon, but to prepare for such an event occurring again, Moreno says that time-tracking mats are used to adjust times accordingly.
“We know exactly how many people were affected, we were ready to make the adjustments," Moreno said. “We’re looking into that right now. By the end of the day, we should have those results adjusted.”
Runners told the station that race officials were busy hand-writing bib numbers of the 200 affected runners so that they could work to resolve the issue later.
The train tracks are located at mile 7 of the half and 17 for the full marathon, which Moreno explained could cause further disruption than just having to adjust times since many runners would have their rhythm and pace disrupted.
“I just hope that people understand that we did everything we could,” Moreno said. “We have no control over the train schedules.”
Laura Ratliff is a New York City-based writer, editor, and runner. Laura's writing expertise spans numerous topics, ranging from travel and food and drink to reported pieces covering political and human rights issues. She has previously worked at Architectural Digest, Bloomberg News, and Master the Half Sales & Deals TripSavvy. Like many of us, Laura was bitten by the running bug later in life, after years of claiming to "hate running." Her favorite marathon is Big Sur.
