On Monday, Sept. 25 the Quad Cities were in full bloom with the Quad City Marathon. Runners came to participate from all around the world. Starting and ending in downtown Moline, the event holds a marathon, half-marathon, and 5k. Winning the marathon was Fikadu Teferi, from Ethiopia, with a time of 2:16:56. The Quad City Marathon is an interesting type of road race and the marathon website perfectly explains why. It states that, “The Quad Cities Marathon is an all volunteer event.” This last year it had a staggering number of more than 1,400 volunteers to help the event run. A general question to be asking by now is where is the boys cross country team in this event? The answer is simply handing out water to the runners as they fly by.

Being an all volunteer event, the PV Boys spent the duration of the day filling up countless number of water cups and handing them out. Along with that obviously came with a lot of fun and goofing off. Their main responsibilities were simply filling up cups and handing them out to runners. Senior runner, Tyler Brewster, was asked about his responsibilities at the marathon in which he responded, “For the marathon, we handed the runners cups of all organic water.” Obviously this is a simple task, but the team still managed to mess things up. Tyler responded to the havoc by explaining, “We had a really good time besides when Connor Flinn caused the stacked cups to fall. Overall everything went very smoothly.” But why did the runners have to volunteer and not run in the race? The reason is because of team policy from Coach, Eric Belby. The runners are not allowed to run in road races during the cross country season, and are only allowed to run in a limited amount in the offseason. The solution to this strict policy is obviously volunteering.