2024 48th Grandma's Marathon - This race was on my calendar a few weeks after Tokyo when I started really feeling better from a hip injury and some post virus heartrate issues - and I trained well for several weeks, but unfortunately tweaked my left hip flexor when starting out too quickly one morning to get a across a street to avoid oncoming traffic and my muscles were not yet warm. That injury derailed my training - first by training through it, the muscle could not properly heal, then various cross training efforts limited my cardiovascular development. In fact, I was not sure I would even be able to run this race even last week - pain in the hip was not fully resolved and the lack of time on my feet plus the lack of long run efforts was going to be the other challenge...I even considered this was going to be a training run, to where if I did not feel well, or the hip was hurting, that I would drop out / DNF to be smart about it.
So...this actually worked out better than I had expected. Travelled up with Richie and Johnny meeting them at the airport in Minneapolis and drove in to Duluth on Friday afternoon. Weather forecasts called for rain and temps in the low to mid 50's. We were hoping for a light rain or just cloud cover and a tailwind - we pretty much got that for the early part of the race. The bus transportation to the start cut it very close. Each of us had to use the toilet and had 15 mins to get that done with long lines for the porta-potties by the time we arrived. Johnny literally exited the toilet and ran to the start and the gun went off. The three of us ran together at just over 9 min pace with constant conversation and interaction with other runners. We picked up a runner age 21 who was in his first marathon with a goal of sub 4 hours around mile 11 or 12. Things were going really better than I had expected, the hip was not really painful and the rain held off for the early miles and the wind was at our backs. Things started to get more difficult for me - I assume because of the lack of sufficient training because my HR started to climb above my AT at around mile 14 and when we got to mile 17 and my HR was approaching the 170 mark at the 9 min pace, I bid the guys good luck and I slowed my pace to try to get the HR down under 160. I was able to run the rest of the miles in the rain, not too significantly slower; in fact I think I had just one mile at 10 pace but I never really blew up in terms of pace per mile and managed to keep the HR as close to 163 ultimately as possible. Last mile was pretty difficult as we swung around facing a headwind and rain coming off Lake Superior. Finished in 4:06 which was about a 6 min positive split from the first half. Richie came in at 3:57 and Johnny at 3:58. We met up afterward after navigating through some really cold windy conditions at a local restaurant; had some lunch, met some new friends and then did a sauna/cold plunge thing at Pier B - which involved jumping into a canal filled with the Lake Superior water that was in the mid 50's. Never expected to be doing that - but it was fun and there were runners from all over the country at the spa that we got to meet. Everyone was so interesting and friendly the entire trip.
Good run - not too sore, except for the left hip, the next day. Going to let the inflammation subside hopefully after a few days, before resuming training.
Marathon #45 is in the books.
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