So there I am, one of what must have been thousands of race fans posted along the curb a few strides after mile marker 24 in Central Park on Sunday afternoon, scanning the river of runners going by for the familiar faces of our loved ones. Mine, I knew, was wearing orange. This was Natasha's first marathon and, as she's from Florida, she decided to wear a Florida Gators running shirt - orange with blue trim. My camera was on the "burst" setting and I was poised to strike. How could I miss her? Surely, with an orange shirt and red hair, she'd stick out like a sore thumb.
Unfortunately, ING Direct, primary sponsor of the New York City Marathon, had given out orange running shirts to all the participants which meant a lot of marathoners were sporting orange. A LOT. And with my consciousness on high alert for an orange running shirt, my eyes were zipping around like a couple of ping pong balls in a room full of mouse traps. I might have had a series of smalls strokes from the effort. Trying to spot her orange shirt in a sea of orange shirts as they ran by was like trying to pick out the serial number on a dollar bill in one of those cash grab tornado machines.
From the time they came into view around one corner to the time they disappeared beyond the line of spectators, there was about a three or four second window of recognition. Each orange shirt carried with it the possibility of Natasha, the possibility of a successful picture memorializing her first marathon. In each of these windows, I'd say there were anywhere from ten to twenty orange shirts blowing by me. And when I think about the mental effort spent in the process of seeing orange, recognizing orange, moving up to the face, understanding that blob floating above the neck to be a face, and then understanding that I don't recognize the face, and moving on to the next orange shirt where this whole process starts over, I'm astounded. All of this happens in less than a second and I, along with everyone else looking out for a particular runner, did this continuously for hours on end. To hell with the runners; we should get medals for our sustained mental exercise!
If we could somehow hook our cars up to our minds when we're "looking out" for something, there wouldn't be an energy crisis. Polar bears would be around for our kids to enjoy and Al Gore would be another fat customer greeter at the Wal-Mart in Knoxville, TN. Maybe it could work something like this: we'd plug our awesome future-cars into a discreet socket right behind our ears and then we'd watch a matrix of images scroll by on a screen (provided to us by the car company, of course) and we'd have to watch out for how many times a picture with a red balloon flashes up. The electricity generated by our brains would charge the car and off we'd go (careful to unplug the car from our heads before leaving, of course).
Anyway, Natasha did great and we were able to meet up afterwards. I got a few pictures of her looking exhausted under the foil blanket. Mission accomplished.