I never like to make public my predictions before a race. I awoke at 2:45 a.m. to begin my prep. for ths mornings marathon, the reason I don't like to make predictons is this. You can train your guts out for one of these insane events, and race morn is a crap shoot. One never knows how one will feel, I was not feeling good about the morn as the sleep just did not happen very well the night before. Loaded the bus and up the canyon we went to the drop off point, it sure seemed a lot longer then a 26.2 mile bus ride. No rain which was a good sign, warmer at the start than I was thinking it would be, should be a good run. The first 7 miles things were feeling good, made the hill at the lake to the dam in good shape and tryed to just let things happen. I would much rather run up hill than down any day, exspescially when alot of the dowmhill was on cement rd. I was feeling good at the halfway point, so I did my best to push it a little bit, thought maybe I could finally make one of these things under 4 hours. By the time I hit the mouth of the canyon my calfs were screaming bad as they began to cramp up. Tryed to push more fulids at each fuel point but did'nt seem to help much, I just tryed to hang on the last 6 miles. All in all it was my best marathon finish at 3:59:44, which brings hope that maybe I can BQ at SGM in Oct. Utah Valley Marathon is a good, seemed very popular this year and I think is becoming that I wil look forward to each year.
My Splits are as follows:
1.9:31 Warm up the old muscels
2. 8:16
3. 8:15
4. 8:14
5. 8:34
6. 8:27
7. 8:30
8. 9:16 Hill time
9. 9:18
10. 8:28
11. 8:29
12. 9:00
13. 8:44
14. 8:49
15. 8:41
16. 9:06
17. 8:49
18. 8:45
19. 8:59
20. 8:59
21. 9:46 Cramping begins and the wheels are coming off, hang on baby
22. 10:12
23. 10:50
24. 10:48
25. 10:57
26.2 9:29
It was fun did better than I had hoped and would like th do this again next year. | 