Des News Marathon I signed up last week on a whim. I wanted to get something long in, and I decided that I would use a marathon as training, and take it easy - you know -- like run 7:00 pace and feel okay. 7:00 pace certainly wasn't happenin once I got going. The first 4 miles are downhill, screaming downhill, and I was easily putting away 5:40's for the first 3. (5:35, 5:39, 5:41). I let the lead group get away (after all, I was taking it easy). My plan was to just pick up people as they fell off the lead group and run with them a ways. This, also, did not happen. The first 6 were pretty friendly, I slowed down for 5 and 6 and was 34:44 at 6. Then came the big hill and I obviously slowed down. I was hurting even, I picked up 3 guys moving into 6th place and was dead at the top of the hill. I didn't remember it being that hard when I ran it a couple times last year. I wanted to recover over the top, and I did somewhat, but by 9 miles I wasn't feeling great. I took my 2nd PowerGel around 12 and kept chugging along. By this point I had settled into 6:10's or so. Honestly, it was the longest 10 mile I've had in any marathon. Generally, I fly through 10 and don't even know it. This time, by 11,12,13, I was feeling it. 6:10's were still coming along but I knew it was going to be a long day. By 16 I was still running, but started to slow down. There were a couple hills in there that took it to me and now I was worried about the field behind me as I knew 2 guys weren't far back. The runner in front of me dropped out before 16 so I moved into 5th. By 18 I had 8 of my toughest miles. Each one was rougher than the previous. I tried to eat some gel and drink some gatorade and managed a little. I somehow made it to 20, then 21, then 22. It's easy to type, but these miles were incredibly, incredibly hard. No idea on pace. Erica kept giving me gatorade and water and I kept putting one foot in front of the other. 23 was shambles. At 24 I was sure I was going to get passed. I must have been running 10:00 pace at that point. 25 was pure hell, I was ready to walk about 50 times. 26 was worse, I walked a few steps, turned around, saw I had about 200 yards lead, and decided I couldn't just throw it away. Final time was 2:46:43 Halfway I was 1:21:20. The splits seemed a helluva lot worse than they were. I would have guessed I slowed down over 10 minutes. Instead, it was only 5. I was really happy with my time and my effort. On my training, there was nothing more I could have done. Only 1 week over 70 miles this year, a lot crappy weeks, etc. So I am more than pleased, and was happy to get 5th. Now we'll see if I can walk tomorrow.
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