It was 6:15 a.m. Sunday, and by then the New Las Vegas Marathon, which is actually the semi-new Las Vegas Marathon, considering this is the second year it has operated under new ownership, was under way.
You wouldn't have know it from my vantage point at the intersection of Fourth Street and Gass Ave. Morning had not quite broken but it was so eerily quiet, you would have sworn it needed fixing.
Everywhere you turned there were sawhorses and reams of that yellow crime-scene tape that blocked traffic from getting through and clogged the main arteries of downtown like bad cholesterol.
Somewhere, somebody was making donuts. But not downtown.
The misty, dark gray of dawn simply would not go away. It was as if the sun forgot to set its alarm. I immediately thought of that Seinfeld episode where Jean-Paul, Elaine's friend from Trinidad and Tobago, oversleeps and misses the start of the New York Marathon.
It was getting colder by the minute as a stiff breeze began to blow. Then off the in the distance, in the shadow of the Stratosphere, I could see red beacons cutting through the murky light.
It was the cops, followed by several vans and SUVs carrying the media freeloaders. About 30 seconds later, the low hum of their engines was followed by the shuffling feet of a single runner lightly scraping along the pavement.
It was the first runner. It was a woman, which surprised me.
She hailed from Kenya, which did not.
It was Jemima Jelagat, who was running in her very first marathon.
She did not forget to set her alarm. But in the lonely cool before dawn, as Bruce Springsteen might have described it, she did not look very happy. She had the look of a woman who was running late. Or in this case, very, very early. Maybe it was because she still had 20 miles to go.
Our eyes met as she padded off toward Glitter Gulch. I wanted to offer her a Red Bull or a hot chocolate or a pair of running shoes with foam inserts. Actually, a few words of encouragement probably would have sufficed.
But as she passed by I just stood there, thinking of something to say.
The real reason I was shivering on a street corner at Fourth and Gass at the rude hour of 6:30 a.m. was to bear witness to the wedding of Jason Thomas and Kimberly Engle of Savannah, Ga., a delightful couple I had met Thursday morning.
The Thomases - she's a nursing consultant, he's an aero engineer for Gulfstream - began Sunday's New Las Vegas Marathon as single entities, at least on the registration sheet. At the 5.5-mile marker, they became runner and nagger - I mean, man and wife - during a run-through wedding group ceremony at A Special Memory chapel.
"Don't do it," shouted several of their fellow runners as the couple veered off Fourth Street along with a couple of dozen running Elvis impersonators who were either hired as witnesses or eluding the authorities.
They did it, anyway.
I've heard of crazier impulses. But they usually involve lots of alcohol, assorted fraternity brothers and a tattoo parlor on the wrong side of town.
The Thomases, on the other hand, seem more centered than the bulls-eye on a dart board. Just the same, I bet their loved ones are happy there wasn't an Army recruiting office along the marathon route.
Throngs of potential wedding crashers wearing thin tank tops and expensive running shoes jogged by the courtyard as the Thomases and the others were uttering promises to each other that, trust me, will make Heartbreak Hill in Boston seem like the Bonneville Salt Flats before it's all said and done.
The bride wore a veil and a wedding dress - actually, it was a white running top and shorts with the couple's initials embroidered on them - by addidas. I don't know about the something old, new or blue. But something borrowed was a Mylar blanket, to ward off the chill.
Jason Thomas, the groom, managed to get through the ceremony without being injured, which, if you remember the UNLV quarterback by the same name, is saying something.
I asked Kevin Streit, the marketing director of A Special Memory, if there are statistics suggesting that couples who run together, stay together.
"Absolutely," he said. "That's because they're willing to go the extra mile."
Remember Jemima Jelagat? Having begun with a head start, owing to her chromosomes, she continued to run alone. Mile after mile after mile.
Only she called them kilometers.
She was still out front beginning the last mile - er, couple of kilometers - when Kip Keino passed her.
Actually, it wasn't Kip Keino who passed her. That's just a name of another runner from Kenya that is imbedded on my brain like an Abba song. The countryman who passed her was Joseph Kahugu, who ran under the giant clock at the finish line when it read 2:16:43, pocketing the first-place prize of $65,000. That will buy a lot of goats and sheep back in the Great Rift Valley, which is where most of the great runners from Kenya hail.
Afterward, Kahugu, who was making his Las Vegas debut, said he blown away, both by the wind and by the many Elvis impersonators he encountered along the marathon route.
"There was a lot of music, and people kept saying: 'Keep going Joseph. You are going to make it,' " Kahugu said in halting English after hitting his stride and never breaking it.
Then his eyes widened and the inflection of his voice raised as if his running shorts were on too tight.
"It was rowdy there," Kahuga said.
That was a word I didn't expect from a native Kenyan. Yet, it was good to hear him say that. It meant it was almost time to take down the yellow tape, to remove the roadblocks, to make the donuts - or at least the 99-cent shrimp cocktails.
It was only 9:30 a.m., and Las Vegas was getting back to normal.
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