Greening Austin Daily

Austin Marathon = Pretty Green

22nd February, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

Last weekend I ran my second Austin Marathon.  The only other marathon/ half marathons I’ve run are the Austin 3M half, the Columbus Marathon, and the San Antonio Rock and Roll Half Marathon, so I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but I was impressed with the continued efforts to make the Austin Marathon as green as possible.  Some of the (green) highlights:

• SWAG bags didn’t contain a bunch of useless coupons and advertisements, just a bib number, some safety bins, a t-shirt, a program, and a arm pouch for carrying keys/money while you run.  This is so much better than what you usually get, which is a bag full of stuff you throw away.  The San Antonio Rock and Roll Marathon in particular I remember had about 20-30 different papers/coupons in the SWAG bag, including fast food coupons which most marathoners probably aren’t going to make use of.  Instead or providing all those coupons and ads, the Austin Marathon homepage said if you were interested in coupons, you could browse through a page from their website and print out what you wanted at home.
• The trash cans that permanently line Congress had signs on them telling people to look for recycling bins instead.
• Recycling bins were everywhere at the start/finish of the race.
• There were signs along the course telling you to throw wrappers into trash cans at the water stops, rather than littering.
• Snack bags (containing a banana and some chips)  at the end of the race were small cloth baggies that you can use again, rather than plastic bags.
• There were large water towers at the start and finish you could use to fill up your water bottle.

Some not so green things I saw along the marathon were hard to avoid in any race:

• The water stops all had paper cups, but unless you run with your own water and have friends along the course to fill your water bottle up, it’s hard to avoid using the paper cups.   I have my own water bottle I run with that attaches to a nerdy belt I wear while running, and I drank from that for the first 10 miles, but then I switched to stopping at the water stops and getting a drink every mile, so I probably wasted between 16-20 paper cups (near the end I got 2 drinks at some stops).
• The program in the SWAG bag wasn’t really necessary for most people who have run the race before or who can just look the info up ahead of time on the internet.
• Also people were offered a bottle of water at the end of the  race, but again, if you don’t run with your own reusable bottle, you need something to drink out of when the race ends.   At least there was recycling provided for those bottles.

But overall, I thought they did a good job with continuing to make the marathon more eco-friendly!