A Long Weekend in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., the capital of the U.S., is a city that demands you see it at least once—ideally more than once, and ideally while running 26.2 miles of it. My late October visit ticked both boxes, combining the Marine Corps Marathon with a long weekend of museums, monuments, bikes, pho, and Ethiopian food.
Food
A few hours after touching down, I met my friends Azad and Donya—who had recently relocated to the city—for dinner at Ethiopic, an Ethiopian restaurant a short walk from Union Station. Ethiopian food is the great equalizer at the dinner table: everyone reaches in, everyone tears off a piece of injera, and nobody can pretend they have better table manners than anyone else. It had been a while since I’d eaten with my hands—Nyala Ethiopian Cuisine in Fort Collins, my go-to for 15 years, closed in 2019—so it was great to be eating this African cuisine again.
I used to joke that eating Ethiopian food would make me run like the great Ethiopian distance runners. With a marathon two days away, this was as good a time as any to test that theory. Kenenisa Bekele’s marathon career personal best is 2:01:41. I was not expecting to run quite that fast, but the injera and lentils couldn’t hurt.
Pre-race carbo-loading was handled by Nostra Cucina, a cozy Capitol Hill Italian spot run by a Salvadoran family who make their pasta, pizza dough, and sauces from scratch. The red sauce here is of the deeply unfussy, deeply satisfying variety—exactly what you want the night before asking your legs to carry you for 26.2 miles.
The most unexpectedly memorable meal of the trip, however, came via Jaleo, a Spanish restaurant in Penn Quarter. I’d found it the previous day by accident, cruising past on a Capitol Bikeshare bicycle when a blast of music by Spanish singer Ana Mena drifted out from inside. This nearly caused me to run a red light doing a double-take. I went back the next day, and Jaleo delivered: tapas worth every moment of the detour.
No visit to D.C. would be complete without at least one bowl of pho. Pho 79, a Vietnamese restaurant within walking distance of the Capitol, was good enough that I went twice.
Sightseeing
My first stop was the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence sits in its dimly lit rotunda like a patient old celebrity who has been signing autographs for two and a half centuries. The ink has faded considerably, but the parchment itself, enormous and deliberate, carries a significance that no photograph or reproduction quite captures.
From there I walked past the White House. Remarkably, there were no protesters, no motorcades, and no drama. I continued on to the museums.
The Natural History Museum delivered skeletons, rocks, and ancient bones in the quantities one would expect. the American History Museum, with its exhibits on electronic inventions and famous Americans, held my attention longer. Both are free, which remains one of Washington’s best tricks.
Race number pickup took me across the river to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. The venue is the size of a small city and roughly as subtle, but the pre-race expo buzz was real—a cocktail of anxiety and excitement that comes from being in a room full of people all about to do something that some folks would say is Not a Good Idea.
Getting Around
The best transportation decision I made all weekend was choosing Capitol Bikeshare as my primary mode of getting around. A one-hour ride along the National Mall cost $4 and delivered unobstructed views of the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial in the golden autumn light. It’s an amazing bargain, really.
Much less of a deal: my experiment with a Spin electric scooter. A 24-minute ride came out to $16, which is roughly what hailing a cab would cost. I had expected the scooter to feel like an upgrade, or at least a lot more fun. It mostly felt like paying a premium to wobble on a motorized skateboard. One ride was sufficient data.
The Marathon and After
The year prior, I had completed my goal of running a marathon in all 50 states. There has been constant speculation that perhaps one day, D.C. will become the 51st state—so consider this marathon as a way to preemptively check off the district.
I always considered “running a marathon” in a specific place as actually running 26.2 miles entirely within its boundaries. Since the official course of the Marine Corps Marathon only covers about 16 miles within D.C. proper, I added extra kilometers before and after the race to ensure I’d logged at least 42.2 kilometers within the District—most of them on the National Mall, which at least made for scenic suffering. Full details are in my race post.
Post-race recovery was handled at Penn Quarter Sports Tavern, where I joined Manuel, Carlos, and Azad to catch the Broncos-Chiefs and Bengals-49ers games. The Broncos won, improbably. The 49ers lost, also improbably. Nevertheless, it was a great sports followup for someone who had just run a marathon.
D.C. does what it does extremely well: monumental architecture, free world-class museums, a dense grid of history packed into a walkable core. It also does something else extremely well, which is reminding you at all hours—via sirens, gridlock, and the general ambient roar of a city that never fully exhales—why you are glad you live somewhere smaller and quieter. Both things can be true at once, and they were.
