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| Date: | 2009-11-22 21:24 |
| Subject: | 26.2 |
| Security: | Public |
I better get this out of the way quickly and keep it short, or else it'll never get done -- kinda like the half-finished blog post about my wedding. Remember that one?
As you know if you've been following my tweets, I ran the Route 66 Marathon in Tulsa this morning. After an 18-week, race-heavy training program that saw me lop several minutes off of my best half-marathon time, I set my sights on qualifying for the 2011 Boston Marathon (the 2010 race is sold out, but more importantly, based on my age on the Boston race date, the time I needed to qualify goes up 5 minutes for 2011).
I started comfortably, not too fast, and was on pace to make the time I needed well into the race. I crossed the halfway mark in 1:37:22, leaving me 1:38:37 to run the second half. But soon after, I could tell I wasn't going to make it. Somewhere around the 14-mile mark, I knew I didn't have another hour and a half of 7:30 miles in me. Every time I checked my watch, I saw that my place had slowed. I'd lean forward and drive ahead to make up the time, but the pattern just kept repeating itself.
Finally, 17.5 miles in, I pulled over and started walking. I walked for a tenth of a mile, then went back to running. But all I could manage was another quarter or third of a mile or so before my legs were out of gas again. I repeated this pattern the rest of the way, more or less, though as walking became more painful thanks to my swollen feet, I tried stretching the jogging intervals out as much as I could. I think I got about the last two-thirds of a mile in without stopping. I probably walked about a mile and a half in all.
Obviously, the walking killed my time -- I was at a 9:49 pace for the last 15K and finished in 3:38:37. I placed 160th of 1222 finishers and 14th of 47 in my age group, but I didn't care about any of that. It was me against the course and the clock, and they won.
Now, I'm not devastated by my performance. I had set a lofty goal for a first-timer and learned a lot along the way. For one, a website that tries to predict your times at various distances can't really take into account what happens to your body after you've been running for two hours. Also, my training was wrong. I followed the "you have to run fast to run fast" method, which is good for shorter races but not a marathon. On a day I was supposed to run 20 miles, I ran 6.9 miles as a warm-up for a half marathon, with a fair amount of rest in between. That mileage needed to be continuous, as I learned today, when 17.5 miles represented the longest I'd ever run without stopping.
If I hadn't qualified today, I'd planned on a spring training schedule for the Oklahoma City Marathon, but I'm scrapping that. I have a half marathon in Austin in February that I'm already registered for, but that'll be my only long race until I start up again for my next marathon, sometime next fall or winter. I'm going to pick a marathon that is more likely to yield a Boston qualifying time, and I'm going to stick to a training program tailored by folks who know a little more about it than I do. This thing is still very much doable -- and if I later find out that it isn't, then maybe I'll just wait a few years until the qualifying standard goes up some more.
I also want to point out that I would have been far less likely to finish the race today -- or possibly even start it -- without the support of my loving wife, Susanne. She's been my biggest cheerleader along the way, and stood around for four hours today with a nasty head cold just to meet me at the finish line to tell me how proud she was of me. Finishing a marathon is almost as big an achievement as getting her to marry me.
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