A Lean and Hungry Look

Boston Marathon.  I ran with Brooke, so I'm not counting it as a race.  Amazing weather, amazing crowds, amazing times up front!  Brooke was on track for around 3:36 at the half (more likely 3:40, given the difficulty of the second half of the course), but her stomach started giving her trouble, then her legs started giving out on the Newton hills.  She gutted it out, though, and was able to pick it up a bit over the final two miles.  All in all, it was an incredible experience just being able to take it all in without worrying about my own race plan or fitness.  I took a lot of photos on my iPhone, recorded the craziness at Wellesley and BC, and even got a photo of Dick and Rick Hoyt as we passed them around mile 8.  Embarrassingly, I had to lay down just past the finish line for about 20 minutes because I kept blacking out trying to walk through the finishing corral (which feels about a mile long) to get my medal and food packet.  Brooke finally had to get the food for me, which included some chips.  As soon as I got some salt in my system, I was fine.  I know my fitness was entirely inadequate for running a marathon, but I think the problem may have been that I'm just not used to being out on my feet for 4 hours (we finished in 4:00:21)!  It gave me a new appreciation for those in the middle and back of the pack in marathons.  It also motivated me to start training for St. George, so that I don't have a 4-hour marathon as my most recent race for too long!

We left Boston yesterday and drove up to Maine for a couple of days, so I ran on the hard-packed sand this morning on a gorgeous beach in Ogunquit.  The wind was blowing like crazy, but it felt great to stretch the legs out a little and to start working out a little bit of soreness from the marathon.  Since the pace of the marathon was so much slower than I'm used to running, it used different muscles.  Instead of my quads and hams being shot, it's my hip flexors that are sore.  I assume that's because I was taking shorter strides and probably spent more effort in an upward direction than a forward one.

We came back to Boston yesterday for one more night before leaving this afternoon.  Brooke and I went for an easy jog around the Boston Public Garden and the Boston Common, then dropped by a secondhand book store and bought a guide for a walking tour of Beacon Hill, Boston's literary district.  We only ran a couple of miles, but we walked at least another 4 doing the Literary Trail, then traveling to Cambridge and walking all over Harvard's campus.  This is an amazing place.  I may have to come back and try to race the course, since I've now run it twice without actually training for the race.