Who's Highest?

I spent some time looking at the websites for all three marathons that I'm considering. Vermont City, Buffalo, and Ottawa are all on Sunday May 24th. I'm sort of committed to this date so that the wife & kids can come along as my cheering/support crew. This will be a Memorial Day mini-vacation for us.

Also, the day before my buddy Rob is getting married in Bean Town, so I'm hopeful that we can do the wedding (and most likely have to skip the reception)... and then reasonably travel the rest of the way. Burlington, VT makes that game plan work the best.

Other considerations are that Canada just seems too complicated. Passports & plane rides. Buffalo has a few advantages in that they offer a half marathon(VCM does not) so if my training goes badly then I could request to step down from full to half. Buffalo costs $10 less than VCM but gives both a quality shirt plus a "I'm in training" t-shirt. That's nice.

The best runner comments I've heard all say VCM is the choice. Also it's the best option if we're going to combine the wedding & race weekends together. So therefore Vermont City gets the nod. According to their website the race is already 40% full (1,400 regist'd outta 3,500 spots). I figure I'll wait another 3 or 4 weeks to be certain that my progress continues.

I'm psyched to have make this decision! I've never been to VT before. I did see the Green Mtns over Lake Champlain when i was on the top of Mount Marcy, NY in summer of '07. Just looked up some VT facts: they are bigger in area than Delaware but smaller in population. That makes Del one of the most densely populated states & Vt one of the least. They have the mountains, we have the shore (or beach as the locals call it). They have an international border; we have the Mason-Dixon line which is sort-of a border. We also have the only weird circle-arc border that projects into MD & NJ due to the very olde fashioned way that things were mapped out. VT's highest elevation is 10 times higher than DE's...but the marathon is supposedly mostly flat, along the shore of Lake Champlain, with some small rolling hills. Delaware's also unique in that there are 3 notable places of "highest elevation" which I read about once but can't seem to find a webpage to link with now.

I've been to the top of all three spots. A marker of highest point is along Ebright Road, and is the official spot. But next to that is a trailer park (of all things!) and the streets within the park were graded for drainage when it was created so that there is clearly a small hill which is higher than the Ebright Road location. I've read that this place doesn't officially count because it's man made and therefore it's only a footnote to the real place. Also, a third spot is the top of Iron Hill, which is just south of Newark. This is the highest "summit" entirely within the state of Delaware. The official location on Ebright is an uphill grade that continues into PA with the top of the hill in the other state. Several other states have this same issue - Connecticut & Massachusetts for instance - where the highest point is the side of a hill which peaks outside their own state in their neighbor's state. DE is the only state I'm aware of that has this combination of 3 highest points depending on how do you want to define who's highest.