Monday, July 27, 2009

Flying pig....

So after my disappointing experience at McNaughton I decided to sign up for a road marathon to hopefully give me some confidence that I could actually put some miles down.

I had not done a big road race since the Derby festival half marathon in '08 so thought it would be something different. I'd also like to eventually join the 50 states marathon club so I figured why not knock off Ohio?

In the time between I tried to get some speed training in on the treadmill but really had no long runs under my belt.

Fortunately race day was cool and cloudy with a bit of a drizzle at the beginning. Forgetting how crowded these big races get I got stuck near the back of the crowd after my early bathroom break. I don't know how many people were there but it was packed. Between the full, half and relay runners I could hardly see the starting line. From the time the gun went off it took me almost 12 minutes to reach the starting line behind the walkers. I had no choice but to take it easy in the first 10k or so since I didn't want a repeat of Louisville where I wasted too much energy chasing down the pace leaders through the crowd.

I enjoyed just taking it easy and trying to conserve my energy for the race ahead. I assumed that after the half there would be very little crowds similar to Louisville but this wasn't the case as there was always a new influx of relay runners. The course wasn't too bad but I've been spoiled by too many trail ultras and it just seems like running in a city.

At any rate my half time was just shy of 2:06 which certainly reflected how conservative I'd been running. Knowing how far back I started my new goal was to try and catch the pace runners knowing that if I could catch up to the 4:10 crowd I had a shot at coming in under 4 hours. I was able to pick up the pace considerably in the second half routinely ticking off miles between 8- 8:30 pace for most of the remainder. There were a few hills that I walked briefly but was able to maintain a good effort for most of the race.

With probably 4 or 5 miles left I finally had the 4:10 group in sight and had something to look forward to. I caught up with them shortly and from then on knew that I could make a sub 4 effort, a personal best by almost ten minutes.

I did get a bit lazy at this point knowing that I was in good shape as long as I stayed with that crowd so I would run to the horizon, walk till they caught me and then pick it up again. I wound up running 3:59:09 which I was ecstatic about considering how little running I'd done in between my last ultra.

I had always wanted to be able to negative split a marathon and was finally able to do so. With my first half being clocked at 2:06 it meant I was able to run the second half at about 1:53 with an overall pace of around 9 minutes.

I was much more sore than I had been over the last several races mostly due to running on the road. Overall it was a confidence building race time wise but I'm ready to go back to the trails in the fall.

Now, on to triathlon season.

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