my makeup may be flaking

So let's review:

Sinus infection hits me in february, stalling my marathon training. Did MI halfmarathon after recovering and ran 1:11:24. Next day I got tendonitis. Two weeks of cross training, followed by a week of training. Then I got sick and recovered on thursday. On wednesday, doctors told me I may have a hernia and during my trip here my groin felt really sore.

Needless to say my expectation were low. At the start I stayed relaxed and just decided to try to pick it up until I found a nice groove. I gradually picked it up until the ridiculous 5:27 in mile 6. I shortened my stride and kept my pace pretty consisten for a while. I could feel myself gradually tightening up though. At mile 12, a competitor told me "There's a lot of guys up there James, see how many you can get", as I was so effortlessly cutting through the field. I responded that I wasn't sure how long I could keep it up. I was confident about sub 2:30 up until mile 19 when I went over 6 minutes for the first time. I realized that I had to average sub 6 the rest of the way and that I still hadn't hit the big one. I was also running out of people to pass at this point and climbed heartbreak all alone.

When I crested heartbreak I knew that it was make of break for me. I had to run sub 5:40 for mile 22 to have a shot at sun 2:30 I thought. I ran 5:52 and knew that it just couldn't happen. My legs were cramping up pretty badly and so I just decided to finish it out and place as high as I could. I still managed to pass more people during the final run into Boston and I managed not to slow down ridiculously.

I staggered across the finish line and almost toppled over but the medical staff was there to catch me. My legs felt totally trashed. This was what I expected from myself. I could tell that my legs were just not used to the pounding of running from the few longer runs I've done in the last month. I'm very pleased that I was able to still PR at BOSTON! despite these issues and I feel like I've got a TON of room for improvement. I'm going to get myself healthy and try again next year.