VOLCANO — Up here, people know about rock and roll and they cheer for it.
Earlier this week, Sharon Faff was in a group of folks having dinner at Kilauea Lodge when an earthquake from the rock — the Halemaumau crater, just a few miles away — shook the place, then it happened again, and then once more.
“It was so much fun,” said Faff, race director for the Volcano Rain Forest Runs. “Every time it shook we all cheered and laughed, everyone in there. We’re used to it, we go with it.”
And that surely includes next month’s half-marathon, 10k and 5k at the Cooper Center, which is carrying a new slogan this year — “Shake, Rattle, and RUN.”
Preparations are underway for the Aug. 18 event and Faff fully anticipates at least the usual 800 or so entrants, but there might even be more.
“Runners are different kinds of people,” she said, with a knowing grin. “You tell them, ‘We’ve had some earthquakes here this year,’ and the usual response is, “Really? Cool, we’ll be there,’ or something like that.
“There is an unpredictability factor in this, and we realize that, but we’ve also done our homework, we’re ready to go.”
Faff, in her ninth year as owner of the Rainforest Runs, was no different than anyone else when the earthquakes at the summit and the lava flows in lower Puna first began. She attended meetings and got to know Civil Defense spokesman Talmadge Mango well.
He answered all her questions, said the rumbles would not spread beyond the area of Volcano Village and that staging the annual event should not be a problem. Mango described the quakes — as many as 500 a day in the area — as being very shallow, meaning they do not spread out much from the spot they occur.
“I had only one question,” Faff said. “That was, ’In the event that the 1-percent chance happened (during the marathon), and I’ve got 1,000 people up here competing and helping out, can you get them all out of here safely?’ ”
Talmadge is a former park ranger, knows the area as well as anyone and assured Faff that if the 1-percent thing happened, he knew all the various routes and how to make use of them to get out of a potentially dangerous area.
So the race is definitely on and Faff thinks there’s chance it could have a large turnout because early entries are coming in frequently, but it’s always the rush at the end that determines the size of the field. People generally put things off until they know they have to sign up or be left out.
If trends from recent years hold, there will be more women entrants than men, which didn’t use to be the case.
“Men always were more than the women and men still are most of the marathon entrants,” she said. “It wasn’t long ago when women were in the minority in the half-marathon, but they caught and passed the men by about 55-45 percent. I think a lot of women don’t have the time on a daily or weekly basis to put in the training you need for a marathon, but this (half-marathon) trend has been happening for the last 10 years with women’s number increasing.”
In the half-marathon itself, one expects to see a competitive finish that will probably include Billy Barnett and Patrick Stover somewhere in the top two or three finishers.
Barnett has won six of these events, but last year Stover trained and peaked for the event, winning by digging deep over the last two miles and outrunning Barnett.
No excuses from Barnett, but he had been training for a 100-mile run, which is not the best preparation for the 13.1 miles of a half-marathon, which is precisely what Stover had trained for.
Bree Wee, who won last year’s half-marathon and has multiple Kona Marathon wins, would be clear favorite for the women’s winner, but Faff recently heard Wee may not be in town for this year’s renewal.
Whoever shows up, they won’t likely forget anytime soon the experience of running on an active volcano.
