Utah Valley Marathon Race Report Wow, where to start here. I was so excited for this race. This was my goal race. I had three goals in mind. 1. Run a 3:06 marathon. Quite an aggressive goal for me. But I trained for a 3:10 marathon and I knew if everything fell into place on race day, this would happen. 2. Run a 3:15 marathon. I know I was fully capable of running this. 3. Qualify for Boston. Run under a 3:35. I better !@#$ well do this one. I knew I had this one in the bag. Started the race out feeling good. I watched as the 3:15 pacer raced out and tried to stay with him. I noticed he was running faster than a 7:26 mile. This frustrated me and messed with my head. I knew I wanted to finish under 3:15 yet he was going faster than I wanted to for the first half of my race. Mentally I couldn't handle letting him slip away. By my garmin, he was running around a 7 min/mile. I asked the guy next to me if the pacer was fast and he mentioned that the pacer was probably accounting for the slow down coming on the hills. Still bugged and mentally frustrated, I kept with him....Big mistake. It took so much effort to keep going up those hills maintaining my pace with such a strong headwind. Had the race ended at mile 18, I would have felt great about my performance....but it didn't. Unfortunately, I pushed it too hard against the wind and on the hills that I didn't have any "juice" left for the last 6 miles. I watched myself drop from a 7:10 min/mile to barely pushing a 9:00 min/mile to finally walking mile 24. I was defeated. At mile 25 I decided I wasn't going to finish this dang thing walking so I was able to squeek out a 9:00 min/mile to finish. Not the strong finish I was hoping for.... I'm trying to celebrate the fact that I qualified for Boston. That has always been a goal for me. The frustrating part is that I didn't train for a 3:21:XX marathon, I trained for a 3:10 marathon. I'm a better runner than what I ran. Lesson learned. Ease up on hills and in wind. Save the effort for the end. And run my own race! I will get under 3:10 one day!
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