A fine finish line

Baldwin High School's Rich Wright is no stranger to the chaos associated with putting on a first-class running event. Baldwin annually stages the state's largest scholastic track and field invitational, and serves as host for the WPIAL Class AAA district finals, too.

But his organizational stamina was put to the test last weekend. Having participated in the inaugural Pittsburgh Marathon as a runner in 1985, Wright went on to help deal with keeping the starting and finish line areas free of craziness in later years. When asked to help out with this year's version of the Dick's Sporting Goods race, his initial thought: no thanks.

"Being older now [he's 55]  I knew it was going to be a bear. I know, I'm not 100, but when you start to work that many events...."

Here's a brief rundown of Wright's last few days. The Baldwin Invitational was last Friday, so he met at 7 a.m. with the coaching staff at Baldwin, where he is one of the head cross country coaches and an assistant with track. The meet went well into the night, and by the time it had ended and Wright, who also handles the box office, had counted up ticket money and gotten it to the safe, he fell into bed around 2 in the morning.

Saturday morning, he was Downtown helping with the Pittsburgh Marathon's children's event.

"If nothing else I did all weekend, I felt good that we made the children's marathon a lot of fun for the kids," Wright said. "They were all smiling and happy, and that's what it's all about."

He was staying at a hotel Saturday night, and went to bed around 2 a.m. An hour later, a motorist ran a car into the front of the nearby Heinz Regional History Center and during the ensuing arrival of the emergency crews, Wright said, "there was no point in going back to bed."

Showered and out the door at 4 a.m., he got ready for race day.

As one of the start/finish line coodinators, Wright was responsible for sorting runners from three different races. Dozens of volunteers -- including Baldwin High School athletes and their parents -- were directed to form human chains at the finish for crowd control in an event that featured a combined total of more than 10,000 runners. Two large sponsors of the races -- Dick's and Philip's Respironics -- had sent volunteers to help, too.

"A lot of us didn't meet until that morning," he said. "My hat's off to them, they had dozens of people there to do whatever we needed. And even the VIPs from Dick's who were there to hold the banners took time to come out and shake hands afterwards."

The UPMC medical staff was also busy near the staging area but through coordinated efforts, everyone pretty much stayed out of each others' ways.

"UPMC was awesome," Wright said. "That was so well orchestrated. Working [last Sunday] was really very pleasurable for me. I was very, very busy and going a little bit out of my mind, as I always am."

As the finish area was being struck and roads reopened, some of the walkers who began their journeys in the dark that morning, still filtered in.

"We gave them their medals and a little awards ceremony," Wright said.

In all, he said, he received nothing but kind words about the return of the race. One aspect the marathon committee might address, however, is an attempt to make the finish line area at the David L. Lawrence convention center a bit more fan-friendly. Due to the necessity of having the medical area nearby, combined with the physical limitations of keeping the finish behind street barriers, there wasn't that picnic-in-the-park sensibility of having the race end at The Point, as there had been in previous years.

"We have to work out a better solution for spectators," he said.

The return of the marathon has been universally heralded as a triumph for the running community and the city. But Wright has little time to reflect on the past weekend, not with a big regional qualifier track meet tomorrow and the WPIAL team championships Thursday. Then of course, there are the WPIAL finals at Baldwin next week, where they're going to try something a little different: this year, the Class AA teams will run there, too.

"We're going to run it like the state meet," Wright said. "We believe it's going to work."

That'll make for a long day. So what else is new?