It was probably around 45 degrees at the race start this morning. I was on one of the earlier buses but the porta-potty lines were still a bit long. So I wandered up the dark road about .1 mile and make a wonderful discovery. There were about a dozen unused lovely blue POP's sitting in the pitch dark on the side of the road. They must have been placed incorrectly and nobody could see them. Only about 20 of us figured this out so we talked and stretched and had pretty much our own personal bathrooms. I believe Paul calls this Narnia :) I knew I could be in for a long day if my IT band did not stay in check. I decided to just run by feel and see what happened. The gun went off and I rolled in to a pretty good pace in the dark. My IT band does not like downhills and this course is downhill for about the first 12 miles. I stayed around a 7:15-7:20 pace through the half, but my IT band was right on the edge so I did not push it. I hit the half in 1:35 and change but unfortunately since we started late that was only 3 minutes before the half would start instead of the 10 minutes it should have been. So I was soon inundated by a sea of fresh half-marathon runners passing me about 2-3 miles later.
I kept leapfrogging several runners throughout the day. On the downhills they would pull ahead and I would catch them on the flats and uphills because that didn't seem to bother me as much. I ran through the 18-mile mark with Barry, Seth, Caesar, and Angela. It was weird to run with a bunch of runners that I know that late in a race. I even commented to Barry how strange this was. We kept passing each other off and on until the uphill around mile 21. I kept pressing up the hill to put some space between us. The only one ahead of me still was Caesar. Chad Anderson, who was running the half-marathon passed me in front of Century high school and wished me luck. He pulled a bit in front of me and settled in about 50 yards ahead. Somewhere between mile 22 and 23 Seth appeared next to me. He was running his first ever marathon and was hanging on great. I had calculated that I was on pace for a 3:23 or so and was OK with that. But Seth was going a bit faster so I latched on to him and it felt OK. At the 24 mile mark I decided to throw caution to the wind and press the pace. I pulled away from Seth and focused on Chad. I blew by Chad around 24.5 and caught Caesar at 25. I ran the last 3 miles at a 7:15-7:30 pace and managed to get a 3:20. Seth came in about 25 seconds behind me for an awesome first marathon finish. I felt good about the fairly even effort today and if I can improve my IT band before St. George maybe I can have a better day there in 4 weeks.
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