A typical race morning usually starts out looking like a scene from a zombie movie: individuals or pairs of people walking down a deserted street, all headed in the same direction.... Inevitably, regardless of the weather, U2's "Beautiful Day" streams out of loudspeakers.

And then there's the perverse joy of subtly working in references to marathon training in daily life, say at the post office or while waiting outside my first-graders' classrooms at the end of the school day.