Despite the cold wet weather on Sunday it was a perfect day to run a marathon. I got to the race an hour before start time to make sure I had enough time to eat and survey the weather to decide what to wear before heading to the start. Pretty much rain drizzle and under 40 degrees till start time at 6am, so I decided to go with my original plan and wear short sleeve shirt and shorts. But I also included my compression arm sleeves for warmth and my beanie to keep my head warm. Pretty much froze up until we started the race and quickly warmed up the first mile in. My plan was to shed the sleeves and beanie as the weather warmed up, but that never happened.
Start of the Marathon had corrals set for expected finish time it was tricky to get to the pace I wanted on the first two miles. Finally when the full marathon split from the half marathon around mile 2 I was able to get to a comfortable pace. At this time I met a runner (Jim) that I ended up running with up to mile 16 and later catching up with him around mile 22. We talked about the lack of mile markers and I was talking up how great my Garmin Forerunner 305 was giving me miles and pace. He was using his watch to try to track his pace by lapping his miles, but the markings were not very consistent. Just after mile 6 heading on to the pathway by the Platte river I looked at my GPS to see what my pace was and it was not on, I hit the power button thinking maybe I managed to turn it off and it was not coming back on. It was still drizzling rain and thought for sure the water got inside where I have missing buttons. DAMN! So much for relying on my GPS for pace and mileage. So I told Jim if he didn't mind me tagging along and trying to rely on his method of finding the markers and lapping to get the pace. We both had the same plan of finishing under 3:30 and we were well ahead of that. For the most part we were maintaining a 7:30 to 7:40 pace up to mile 16 where he decided to move ahead or maybe I was slowing down a bit who knows. From here it was all down hill back to the finish line at City Park. Around mile 23 or 24 there was a nice short hill climb on 17th and Broadway. I felt like I powered up the hill with no problems specially after running 23 miles and I think this is where I caught up with Jim and we asked each other what mile we were at and the last mile marker I saw was 18. At this time I was wondering how many miles left and what my time was. I passed a bank with the time on it and it said 9:12 and figured I had less than 2 miles to go. As always the last two miles seem to take forever and not knowing what my pace was I'm pretty sure I wasn't keeping below a 8 min pace. Finally entered City Park and had to go through an out and back section, which really sucks because you just want to get to the finish line. After that it was probably another half mile away to the finish! I came in to the finish line around 3:23 and was excited to finish under 3:30 and the runners high was kicking in. What was even better was my family was there to greet me! Yeah! Kate and the kids got there just a few minutes before I finished, talk about perfect timing. Since the weather was still crappy we decided we should get out of here and not hang out to check out the tents or even get my free watered down beer. We ended up heading over to the Museum to check out the new Pirate exhibit and figured it would be good to keep on walking around instead of sitting and end up my legs cramping up. All in all it was a good day!
So when it came to nutrition for the race I had a whole wheat bagel with peanut butter about an hour before the race along with coffee. Then 15 minutes before the race I ate a Lara bar. As for the race I used my
Amphipod and stuffed 6 GU's in it along with my truck key. My plan was to eat one GU every 4 miles or around every 30 minutes. Of course it was hard to track once I my GPS died, so I tried to rely on the mile markers. I was pretty good about taking them every 4 miles and I think I may have taken one around mile 20 just to make sure I have enough juice to make it to the finish. This was good practice for my longer runs coming up to get my body use to ingesting food while running.
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| Reese and I at the finish. Reese was a little grumpy, but I don't blame her it was pretty cold out! |
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