Runners at the entrance of Skechers booth, photo by Larry Eder
After the press conference, I wrote for while and then, headed into the expo. The footwear and apparel sponsor for Houston Marathon is Skechers Perfomance. Their booth had good traffic, with purchases of shoes and apparel. The race apparel was very popular, but the most popular part of their booth was the Skechers Performance Wall.
The Wall has words of encouragement for the runners this weekend, and it to be placed on the course so the runners can see it! Skechers hired an artist, who goes by Skeez181, who was this pretty mellow artist. Skeez is an art teacher, artist and bike enthusiast. He provided some fun illustrations on the wall, and the rest of the walls (about 100 feet long would be my estimate) were notes of encouragement from families of runners.
The 5k will have between 5-6,000. The Half Marathon and Marathon have 27,000 signed up, pretty evenly between both races. If the weather is as hot as promised, we will see many move to the half marathon from the marathon. The moment of decision comes at 8 miles on the course, and runners can choose to shorten their day.
It is a nice touch, and shows how much the sport has grown and changes, most of it for the better, in the past three decades. I have included the video I did for Facebook just below.
