Ran the inaugural Fall Classic Marathon today. Kind of funny a first-year race can be named "Classic". But anyway...
I ran entered this race on a whim last weekend, mainly because my training partner Mike was running it, and I didn't want to do a 22-miler by myself this weekend. So a marathon sounded more appealing, especially one with 2500' drop from Estes Park to Loveland. I was a little worried about destroying my quads, as I have not trained for downhill at all, but it turned out okay.
Mike and I had no competition for the race, which was fine by us. Basically it was a paid tempo run, but running 26.2 is hard no matter what pace. My calves and achilles were pretty beat up by the end, plus my groin has been sore again lately. Quads were fine.
This course was a bit harder than the website made it look. It started on a long uphill through Estes (7500'), and there were several other significant uphills. Started at 7500' and ended at 5000', so higher net elevation than any downhill Utah Marathon, plus a decent amoun of uphills, but mostly at the begining and end.
We did negative split (1:17:35, 1:14:55), so that was good. Mike and I ran together, and then I took off the last mile, and won by 4 seconds, to get revenge over him outkicking me the last 100m on the Labor Day race. The last 10K was probaby the best part of our race. The course was missing quite a few mile markers, so the splits below are the best I can do:
6:42, 5:50, 5:58, 5:38, 5:50, 5:40, 6:10, 6:07, 5:50, 5:58, 5:29, 5:43, 5:53, 28:27 (5-mi), 6:15, 11:42 (2-mi), 5:14, 6:08, 11:14 (2-mi), 5:27, 1:05 (0.2-mi)
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