Late bloomers: Hourlong delay at the starting line leaves some racers dismayed on Bloomsday’s 50th

Around 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, Annette Barfield, her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law and 5-month-old grandson all waited in the stroller section for the Bloomsday starting gun.

About 15 minutes passed. Then 30 minutes. At 11:30 a.m., an hour after their leg of the race was supposed to begin, the stroller section finally started to move. But by then, the 72-year-old Barfield said the annual event was already soured.

During the hottest part of the day, around 1 p.m., when Barfield and her family were only 4 miles into the run, they elected to go home. The grandson had become hungry and unhappy, law enforcement along T.J. Meenach Drive announced runners needed to move to the sidewalk as they were reopening traffic, and Barfield said she felt like Bloomsday had forgotten about them, like they were “outcasts.”

“I guess my concern was,” Barfield said, “if they knew how many people were registered, I just don’t understand how it got away from them.”

Bloomsday Board President Michael Kiter said the volunteers working the starting line couldn’t have started people any faster and kept the race moving as seamlessly as possible. He said their biggest concern was congestion down on the Marne Bridge, which is about a mile away from the start. When the narrow bridge becomes crowded, it affects runners’ final time, he said.

“While folks had to stand around a little bit longer than we would have liked,” he said, “they weren’t having to stand around waiting with their clocks slowly ticking and their time growing larger because they were stuck there (at Marne).”

In an effort to control congestion, Kiter said they divided some color groups into halves or thirds. Once one subgroup of red started, then they had to wait before starting the next division of red runners.

Barfield has done Bloomsday about 20 times since 1992 and said she’s never experienced a delay like the one this year. Even when the race had as many as 60,000 participants, she said there weren’t any significant delays, as far as she can remember.

Kiter pointed out that Bloomsday used to have a two-prong start, although he isn’t sure when they stopped doing it that way because he wasn’t involved back then.

“That point (at Marne Bridge) in the course can create a bottleneck of sorts,” said Bethany Lueck, the Lilac Bloomsday spokesperson. “And so what they do is they have basically a spotter down course to relay back to the start if they need more time to get the crowd cleared through that area and thinned out before they send the next wave of people.”

A delay that occurred first in the green section, which is one of the sections with the most amount of people, then “snowballed” and affected the other sections, Lueck said.

Lueck and Kiter both said they’re holding a meeting Thursday to address what changes could be made in the future to make the start line move along more efficiently.

“If folks want to have the city expand the Marne bridge for us, we can definitely move things quite a bit faster,” Kiter said.

Kiter said it’s likely that future Bloomsdays will see a slight change in start times depending on the number of people who register.

City Council member Michael Cathcart ran just in front of Barfield, carrying a stroller of his own. He said this year was the longest delay he’s ever experienced, and he hasn’t heard an official reason as to why the start took so long.

“The hearsay, I guess, was that one of the groups, I think it was green, had so many more people in it that it challenged the logistics of things,” Cathcart said.

Cathcart doesn’t believe the delayed start dampened his or his family’s spirit, as he called Sunday morning a “fun community event.” But he did say keeping small children in strollers content becomes more challenging the longer the start is delayed.

As for changes that could be made, Cathcart said he would triple the number of groups, have considerably more smaller groups and send them out every five or so minutes, not every 15 to 30 minutes.

Despite the antsy atmosphere that hung in the air, Cathcart described the scene at the start of the race as lively and a very good time.

“Overall, I mean, Bloomsday is a fantastic event,” Cathcart said. “And I have fun doing it every year.”