2023 New York City Marathon - this was kind of a mixed bag for me. I had intended to run this as a pacer with Richie and his employee Johnny to get them under 4 hours. Similar to Berlin a few weeks ago, I expected to go out easy with a pace around 9:30 and begin lowering average pace over the course and enjoy their company. Also, I did not feel all that great having a stomach bug yesterday and I did not want to push hard and end up with more aches and pains leading up to Tokyo in March.
Unfortunely those plans evaporated almost immediately. We started the race on the lower level of the bridge, which I think I have only done one time - and we met up with a friend of Richie's who was running at the starting area - and her plan was to run with us; and so the coordination of running with 4 runners became a little more complex. Being on the second level of the bridge, caused problems with the Garmin GPS - so I was uncertain if the effort was accurate when we came through the mile at 10:30. At that point, I think I looked over and back and suddenly noticed Richie and the others had dropped back about 7 yards. I caught his eye, and he gave me the thumbs-up that they were good and could see me. So I slowed down but at this point we were on the downside of the bridge and gauging my effort was tricky - I was really just floating and allowing gravity to carry the pace without pushing it. Unfortunately, when I looked back again, I could not see them at all. I slowed almost to a stop and still could not locate them. At this point I thought I would just run easy and hope they would rejoin...but it never happened. By the time I got to 3 miles I was conflicted - but decided to run at an easy to moderate training pace as long as I could keep my HR in the 140's for the early part of the course - but I would give up the effort for now to try to have the group rejoin.
The GPS on the Garmin seemed to right itself in the middle miles - lining up fairly well with the mile markers with the autolap feature and it was showing me running 8 minute pace. So, then of course I started thinking, well maybe if 8 min pace is easy, and the day is nice, I wouldn't mind pivoting to running 3:30. Things seemed to proceed well along those lines until we climbed over the 59th street bridge and my HR went up to 160 and the GPS got wonky and was nearly a half mile short and got progressively off from that point onward.
I tried to dial down my effort on 1st Ave - and still my pace was in the 7:30 range - but I could feel the bright sunshine dehydrating me despite my best efforts to keep things under control. Perhaps the stomach bug from yesterday was the primary culprit - but this course is very exposed for almost the whole race - and even though everyone said the weather was great (52 at the start with no wind) the sun was a factor. Anyway - as I crossed the bridge out of the Bronx - I began to have cramping in my leg muscles - and having experienced that in the past and having tried to run through them with little success - I decided to convert the last 4 miles to a walk/run. So I went from an average pace of about 8:17 at mile 14 and 8:23 at mile 20 to a finishing average of 8:56 - the last 4 mile at 10 min plus pace.
But on the brighter side of things - I completed my 13th NYC Marathon - ran under 4 hours; got to spend time with my daughter in Brooklyn and she came out to support me with her friends at the 12 mile mark and then at the finish. Richie was able to get in just under 4 hours and though Johnny was not as fast, he did PR with a 4:17. They were not upset with me getting away from them early on and we enjoyed each other's company back at the hotel with a great meal from room service. So although the race did not go as intended or expected - it was just one more in the memory book of marathons and overall a nice way to spend the first weekend in November in New York for another year.
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