Decided to run the Colorado Marathon today just 3 weeks after Boston. Felt I was in PR shape at Boston, but the warm weather made me adjust my goals. Goal today was to go as quick as possible and PR as big as possible. Pre-race stuff went pretty much normal all week. Got up at 3am and drove up to Fort Collins to catch the luxury bus to the start line. The Colorado Marathon loses about 1000 feet of elevation, so they drive us up to the start, which is up in the mountains and really pretty that early in the morning watching the sun come up. weather up there was pretty good mid to upper 40s and it stayed cloudy through about 17-18 miles. After that it was starting to get pretty warm pretty quick. My watch couldn't find the GPS signal at the start so I had to just do the watch time, then I reset it and tried to find the GPS signal again by the one mile mark, but it wasn't working so I just set it to keep time and so not only was my watch time one mile short the whole race, but I don't know how to keep manual splits, so I had to do all the math in my head the whole race (or at least for the first twenty or so miles). I do remember a few splits: 10 mile was somewhere near 1:05:xx, half marathon was 1:26:06, 1:38:xx at 15 miles. Half split was actually a little slower than I was hoping for. I will say that I definitely still "felt" Boston in my legs as I just was kinda worn throughout the first half. The first half contained most of the downhill, after that the course levelled off and even had some hills. I struggled at about 22 miles and actually came to a full stop at the 22nd mile marker. Just up-and-stopped and took about a 10 second rest before continuing on. I thought that since I had stopped there, that I would keep stopping (as so usually happens if you stop once) but I was happy with the fact that once I restarted, I ran the rest of the way and stayed relatively close to pace, although mentally and physically I was struggling that last 4 miles. I turned up the street to finish and the official clock was way off, so I could tell I had PR'd by my watch (even though it was off), but I wasn't exactly sure by how much or what my time was. It was kind of cool to go look at the results and be surprised at what I saw: 2:55:11, which was later revised to 2:55:10 officially. 6:40 avg pace, a new PR by almost 2 full minutes! I was very happy with that and its always nice to get a new PR, but that rest break cost me a sub-2:55 and a 10+ min BQ!! Oh well - If I hadn't just run Boston three weeks ago, I probably could have gone much faster anyway. Definitely not running another marathon til next year's Boston most likely. Going to do Bolder Boulder and then take some time off in June. Overall, a good race and something I'm proud of. Just not the smartest thing to do two races in three weeks (despite the PR today, I am sure I will be sorry tomorrow!)
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