Utah Valley Marathon today. Heading into this run, I was a bit concerned due to lingering soreness in my left calf. In all honesty, since Ogden, my training has not been great as each time I've upped my training the calf has started to feel sore. Rather than risk injury (like way too many other bloggers) I've held back. I had hoped that I'd be able to kick things in gear anyway. Also, I was under the wrong impression that Utah Valley would be a bit faster course than Ogden. This proved to be erroneous, as most real race efforts seemed about 5 minutes slower than Ogden.
Got
up, drove from home in Riverton to the buses. Met up with Tom Lee, who was so gracious as to pick up my packet the night before. Tom and I had planned on running together and going for the elusive sub 3:00. We got on one of the later buses along with Rich Borget, and had a nice ride. The weather, though humid, was holding pretty well -- no torrential thunderstorm. We took care of business and moved toward the start. Saw a few other bloggers, and soon the starting gun alomost went off. (Technical difficulty as the blank didn't fire initially, but the race was on.) Here are my splits:
| 1 | 6:51 | | Rolling. Nice comfortabele
| | 2 | 6:30 | 13:21 | Downhill | | 3 | 6:47 | 20:08 | Rolling downward. | | 4 | 6:44 | 26:53 | Rolling downward. Seems I've already dropped Tom Lee by now, though not by much.
| | 5 | 7:11 | 34:04 | big uphill portion
| | 6 | 6:33 | 40:38 | Downhill. | | 7 | 6:35 | 47:14 | Downhill. Still feeling fine.
| | 8 | 6:43 | 53:58 | Downhill. | | 9 | 6:33 | 1:00:31 | Downhill. | | 10 | 6:40 | 1:07:12 | Slight downhill net. | | 11 | 6:42 | 1:13:54 | Mild uphill, turns. | | 12 | 6:55 | 1:20:49 | Mild uphill. I lose track of where were were on the course, though I recall it being much more up and down than I had anticipated.
| | 13 | 6:45 | 1:27:02 | Mild uphill. Half in 1:28:58 (my Garmin was a bit off of the official mile markers already, despite running pretty good tangents)-- felt good about my half split.
| | 14 | 6:53 | 1:34:28 | Course sucks along the river. Too much winding and dramatic up and downs under the bridges.
| | 15 | 7:25 | 1:41:54 | Technically a slight downhill, but you cannot tell, bridges, turns. I was starting to lose it already, could tell my fitness had suffered with the conservative training to prevent injury.
| | 16 | 7:56 | 1:49:50 | In hindsight, I suppose I was doing better than I thought given that the course was actually tougher than Ogden. However, saw sub 3:00 gone.
| | 17 | Auto lap 5:53
| 1:55:43 | My Garmin really messed up here, don't know what happened
| | 18 | 8:56+ 1:29 | 2:04:40/2:06:09 | Finally reset splits mannually. At this point I could see sub 3:00 was way gone, and totally decided to ease in and avoid any injury. Surprised Tom Lee hasn't caught me only to find out he had a terrible migrane.
| | 19 | 8:34 | 2:14:43 | Thinking, this sucks, way too early to be waddling in, but mentally once the sub 3:00 was gone, didn't care if I was now 3:30.
| | 20 | 8:36 | 2:23:19 | I think its sometimes harder to slow down, this pace really sucks but I'm trying to be smart and not push anything.
| | 21 | 8:47 | 2:32:07 | Slight up from here to end. I think I ran some of this with a BYU student. I had jokingly motioned to some guys parked in a truck to drive me in. One of them thought I was signalling for him to come run with me and all of a sudden he came running up along my side. He had some drum sticks, so I talked with him about percussion for a bit and the BYU marching band, of which he was a member.
| | 22 | 10:05 | 2:42:12 | I don't remember which miles were which, but I even used the restroom here, just to make the agonizingly slow miles more comfortable.
| | 23 | 9:26 | 2:51:38 | As MichelleL can attest to, I did a fair amount of jog/walk these last miles.
| | 24 | 9:19 | 3:00:57 |
| | 25 | 9:41 | 3:10:38 | | | 26 | 10:02 | 3:20:40 | | 26.2 (garmin .27)
| 2:00 | 3:22:41 | Coasted in all alone, 2 minutes ahead of the next finisher.
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So
looking back, I was pleased with the first half, and my calf never acted up too much. When I realized I couldn't hold sub 3:00 pace, mentally I really shut down, not wanting to get hurt over a 3 something effort. Again, too many of you other bloggers have seriously injuries which scare the begeebers out of me. The last 11 miles sucked, as this turned into a training run.
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