I survived! I'm overweight, I trained poorly (21.7 miles a week for the 50 days leading up to St George, not counting the hiking mileage in Africa), and I'm overall in bad shape. That said, I performed reasonably well for where I was at. This was my 2nd fastest marathon, but my PR (2:42:07 in bad conditions on a harder course) is a vastly superior performance. Anyway, I think I've got the effort and nutrition figured out pretty well for marathons now. As usual, I avoided dairy the day before, went to the bathroom 3 times before the start, ate 2 large bananas, some juice, and a 200 calorie granola bar before hand. During the race, I had gels at 6, 12, and 18, and slowly sucked part of a 4th around 24. I'd normally have one more, but I didn't feel like I needed it. I had pretty even splits (1:24:27, 1:25:19, although a negative split here would be ideal) and kept it sensible. Honestly though, even if I had gone out slower, I doubt I'd have been able to close any faster, as I'm just not strong right now. Hip was a little irritated in the last 12, but never bad. My shoes are pretty worn, so my feet hurt a bit in the last 2 miles. Overall, this was a lot less painful than my 2:42 in Phoenix since I didn't quite push myself as hard. I probably had it in me to make it a minute or two faster, but I just didn't want to kill myself for a slightly faster time that would still be well off a PR. Overall, I think that while climbing Kilimanjaro severely impacted my training (took 2 weeks, never got serious about it once I returned, and, for whatever reason, left my legs just feeling really week for a long time), it was mentally helpful here and will be mentally helpful in the future. Climbing/freezing/struggling to stay awake for 6 hours in complete darkness on summit day with extremely low oxygen was, at least for me, far harder than any marathon I've done and I kept thinking about that during this race. Thoughts like "I suffered worse than this for 6 hours straight back in August... another hour of pain isn't nearly as big of a deal." definitely made the marathon feel a lot easier. In any case, I will take the next one more seriously.
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