Arianna Georgi

 I recently signed up for the Baltimore Marathon.  This also means that I received the Baltimore Marathon “In Training” Shirt.  The “In Training” shirt is an extra you can order when you buy your entry, a technical shirt that states your intention to run the marathon so that everyone on your local running path is aware of it and can congratulate you accordingly.  I like to get myself the “In Training” shirt when I register for a marathon (I will refer to the “In Training Shirt” as “ITS” from here on out since typing “In Training Shirt” is annoying).  It’s a nice motivator for the actual race and also it makes me feel better than other people because I am planning on running a marathon and therefore am awesome.

Normally the ITS is something cheery.  For the Las Vegas Marathon, it was baby blue with the famous “Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas” splashed across the front.  For the Philly Marathon, it was a much more serious technical shirt with a small emblem on the front.  I was eager to see what the In Training Shirt for Baltimore, my hometown, would look like.   The shirt showed up in a beaten up brown envelope with my name hand written across the front.  It was the sort of envelope you would expect dirty magazine to arrive in, and that’s sort of what I thought it was until I saw that the return address was the sports company.  With great anticipation, I ripped it open, and found the most Baltimore-like tee-shirt humanly possible. 

While most training shirts are flashy colors, or filled with colorful logos, the Baltimore shirt is a cold concrete grey with black letters.  It’s like the people putting the shirt together said, “Hey, what color should we make this Baltimore shirt?  Pink?  Fuchsia?  How about just concrete grey, like the cold Baltimore winter sky?”  And they went with the later.  On top of not having any nice colors, the back features the Baltimore skyline which I will be the first to admit is not really as memorable or scenic a skyline as say, New York City’s or even San Diego’s.  Baltimore has many nice things about it. Delicious steamed crabs, the Inner Harbor, and so on, but the skyline is not one of them.  I’m okay with that, but wearing it on a shirt seems to be equivalent to saying “Yeah, so our skyline is pretty bleak and industrial.  Whatever.  It’s Baltimore, deal with it, hon!”  I have to imagine that the only way they made the final decision to use the skyline to epitomize Baltimore was that it came down to either that, John Water’s face, or a scene from The Wire and they went with the skyline. 

To top it all off, beneath the skyline are the words “Baltimore or Bust.”  No, “Baltimore, here I come, I’m running the marathon!” or “Baltimore Rocks!”  Just “Baltimore or Bust”… “or bust,” a saying that was popularized during the depression when people said “California or Bust” and literally meant that they either were going to make it to California or die trying.  The sentiment seems to add to the shirt’s overall message that “Yeah, I’m running the Ballmore marathon, wanna fight about it?”

I wore the shirt out swimming with Tanya last night and got the following reaction, “Uh, that’s an interesting shirt.  What is that on the back?”  I explained to her that that was our Baltimore skyline and she agreed with me that it was not the best thing to put on a shirt.  My Baltimore in training shirt is not particularly attractive, slightly strange, seems to have an attitude, and is oddly appealing to me in its unapologetic ugliness.  It’s the most Baltimore-like shirt humanly possible.  I love it.

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