Try as I might, I cannot be a runner.

I joined the track team in eighth grade and faked an injury on the second day so I’d never have to do it again. A few years ago, I flirted with jogging for a few mornings because it looked sort of fun, but I soon learned that I valued 30 extra minutes of sleep over an endorphin rush. Still unwilling to give up for good, I signed up for the annual Turkey Trot last Thanksgiving, but the measly 5K destroyed me ... by the end, old men with walkers passed me on the way to the finish line. I limped for a week afterward.

So I can’t run. The Bolder Boulder is not in my future. I’m at peace with it.

Well, mostly ... in fact, I’m still pretty jealous of those who can and do run, those gangly-looking guys who are all Adams apples and elbows. If you’ve ever met a serious runner you know they occupy an ethereal plane of consciousness after a few miles that us mere walking mortals will never so much as whiff. In general, that’s no huge regret, as far as I’m concerned ... in order to get there, after all, you must be a stone masochist who has no problem pounding your knees into fine grated glass and burning up your lungs for hours on end as if you’d just inhaled flaming gasoline.

As usual, I digress ... the point is that standing in the spectator’s section at the Colorado Marathon last weekend, I watched the runners cross the finish line with head-shaking astonishment that human beings willfully make themselves run for more than 26 miles at altitude. That every person was buzz-drunk with the effort made me envious, but it was also easy to pick up a contact high ... and it was easy to bloat up just a bit with some hometown pride. Someone said the race lured people from 42 countries to Fort Collins and they all had the chance to see the city in its glory. The weather was perfect, the river was full of water bouncing down the canyon, CooperSmith’s treated everyone to free beer and the community’s verve was on full display as people packed the intersection of Walnut and Linden streets to cheer on the finishers.

And then the train came through.

Talk about a “Doh!” moment ... keep in mind that this event was a bit more high-minded than the Turkey Trot. Not everyone who flew to Fort Collins for the race came because it’s pretty here. That’s a perk to the fact that the race is a qualifier for the Boston Marathon, which is to footracing what the Kentucky Derby is to horseracing. It wasn’t unusual to see a number of runners keeping their own time; their only worry—and it wasn’t unfounded—was whether or not the “traffic cops” were paying enough attention to their homestretch speed bursts to successfully coordinate the flow of cars going one way with runners going the other.

The train brought the entire race to a screeching, rubber-legged halt for several long minutes. It lumbered across the road, slowed down and then stopped dead. If you think it’s hard to run a marathon, try having to stop three hundred yards before the finish line while watching the precious minutes melt away along with your dream of qualifying for Boston. The only upside was that there were no runners for the cops to steer traffic into for a short time. For us natives, the sight of a train impeding all progress on a major roadway was nothing new. For the out-of-town runners, it was an abomination. For a few mortifying minutes, Fort Collins wasn’t about sunshine and yellow finches and friendly faces at the finish line. It was a grimy boxcar scrimmed with graffiti intruding on one of the most prestigious races in the country. Cowbells stopped clanging, people stopped waving, the announcer ran out of names to read off the computer screen because no one was crossing the finish line. The locals passed embarrassed glances with one another, silently thankful that this wasn’t like the Bolder Boulder because then the gaff would have been broadcast on ESPN.

Eventually, the train got moving again, back the way it came—another phenomenon that Fort Collinsers have given up trying to understand. Why can’t these trains make up their damned mind which way they’re going? The knot of stranded runners peeled off toward the finish line, the cheering resumed and life returned to normal. As far as I know, no one failed to qualify for Boston by the exact amount of time it took the locomotive conductor to get his act together and move the train.

Of course none of this is anyone’s fault. Fort Collins has no say over the train schedule, and the train companies can’t be expected to realize that a marathon would be crossing at one point somewhere along thousands of miles of train tracks ... but it might be a good idea next year for someone to point out that the possibility exists for it to happen again. The right PR could turn it into a quaint quirk of the course, some unavoidable risk that runners will just have to deal with, like being mauled by a mountain lion. Anyone who complains just needs to train harder and run faster to build in a little cushion, a few minutes of insurance against unscheduled stops.

If anyone is going to embrace the logic of such advice, take my word for it—it’s a marathon runner.