Awesome day ... I think you all know the conditions runners were faced with!
I had no real time goal, just wanted to make sure I stayed comfortable so I could enjoy the day, and if by some stroke of magic I had a chance at a good time, I would roll with it & push ... but was not concerned with time.
My brother dropped me off about a 1/4 mile from the start at 7:30 & I walked to athletes village ... where I just relaxed, hydrated, ate bananas & a bagel. Met some cool people & before I knew it we were making our way to the start. Most of the day I just ran with the flow of people ... started off at a 7:00 mile pace ... and while this was comfortable ... I knew this would be trouble ... so at about the 3/4 mile mark I jumped off the road for a quick pit stop ... which apparrently I needed from all my hydrating ... because it lasted about 30 seconds! This was good, because when I jumped back in, the pace was a little slower.
By Mile 4, I realized just how hot things were going to get, and basically determined I had 2 options: 1) Push the pace & be miserable and still not be happy with my time, or 2) Back off, enjoy the day, and not worry about my pace. Option 2 was the only logical decision ... coming off knee injury and facing extreme heat conditions, pushing it would make no sense. It was at this point that I started dumping water on my head at just about every opportunity I could ... which was pretty much whenever you wanted ... because the spectators were awesome in their support of the race ... water, ice, popsicles, bananas, cold sponges ... you could get pretty much whatever you wanted when you wanted it!
By Mile 7 I could feel myself overheating, so the water dousings became more frequent. At this point I met up with a couple other runners from the Atlanta Track Club, and ran a few Miles with them around 7:30 pace. After a while I let them go, because I wanted to stop more frequently to make sure I stayed cool & did not want to chase them down every time I did this ... but it was fun to run a couple miles with them ... in the end we had the same time anyway ... and I passed one of them in the last quarter mile.
Around Mile 10, my average pace started dropping pretty substantially, but I really was not running slower, just stopping more often to dump water on head, stand in front of a sprinkler, kiss girls fro Weelsley College, and just soak up the experience while I kept my body temp down ... I guess I did a good job of this as I experienced some chills ... not sure if this was a sign of overheating or over cooling ... but I was going to err on the side of the latter!
At no point in the race was I really uncomfortable, as I took all precautions against going there. The crowds were awesome ... it was easy to get them riled up with high 5's while doing 100 yards pickups & pumping my fist. Another fun thing to do was to get a glass of water & throw it on the boisterous college spectators & then take off in a sprint ... they loved that & and it always got a loud response from the crowd. Of course, 50 yards down the road I would just slow back down.
The hills of Newton were not bad, of course I was running conservative and not racing ... I knew when I reached the top I was home free ... I have not run over 14 miles since I injured my knee in January. I met my brother at Mile 21, hung out & chatted with him a minute or two ... it was great to see him at this point in the race. He asked how I felt & I responded, "Great, I am just out for a jog in the park, there is plenty left in the tank." I thought about ruuning hard the last 5, but it just did not make sense, I did do a bunch of spurts to energize the crowd, but just followed those with recoveries. I think I had ice cubes in my cap about 10 of the last 13 miles!
All in all it was an awesome day ... and while I am a little stiff today ... the best thing about my conservative approach will be a quick recovery. I will return to Boston another day to race!
Splits: Pace
5k: 23:25 7:32
10k: 24:13 7:48
15k 24:22 7:51
20k 27:34 8:52
Half: 1:45:41
25k 27:11 8:45
30k 29:23 9:30
35k 32:43 10:32
40k 30:23 9:47
42k 12:32 10:05
3:52:08 8:52 Overall Avg Pace | 