Firstly - apologies for leaving some of you hanging with my ambiguous Facebook comment on race day. I forgot about that until people started asking questions this week. I'm afraid this race report will be a bit of the let down after the wait :)
I have a process (vaguely) for how I write up a race report. It starts with a bunch of notes of things I remember or might want to say about the race, most of them taken the same day. I'll add any other tidbits I think of to that list for a couple days. Then, I just let it sit for a while. And after some random period of time, I look through my notes and write something. Or try to write something.
That random period ended earlier this week. I read through my collection of little phrases and unformed sentences. It felt a lot like a giant haiku poem (without the picky rules). And now you know why there are haiku sprinkled throughout this thing. Like this first one...
Wake an hour early
Try to sleep just a bit more
Resistance: futile
The morning started off just about the way you'd expect one of my race mornings to go, at least if you've read any of my race reports before. Eyelids suddenly flying open at 3:30 AM in a brief, but intense panic that I'd somehow slept through the alarm.
The alarm was not set to blare for another hour still. So I put my head back down and feigned sleep, opening one eye to check every now and then that I hadn't missed it. The usual paranoia.
Coffee essential
For moving the mind, and uhh...
Flushing the system
When I finally tired of playing peek-a-boo with the alarm clock, I rolled out of bed and set myself to the second most important task of that first hour - making coffee. Which led (predictably) to the most important task of the first hour. That gave me a chance to marvel once again at the old-school-state-of-the-art feeling of my hotel room.
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| Really? |
I sit and ponder
Why is there a phone in here?
And who would use it?
Seriously. Whose idea was that first throne phone? And who saw that and thought "This is a great idea!" and allowed the concept to spread to so many other hotels? I guess it doesn't really matter. What mattered at this point was to eat and get dressed and ready to go.
No snowman pants today :(
Save them, for New York!
For those who are keeping count and about to tell me I just cheated there (and I know there's at least three of you), the frownie counts as a single syllable. It is pronounced "hrm".
Never mind. Let's go!
Cab to bus and bus to school
Walk to the start line
Ok, so that part actually covered a lot more time than those seventeen syllables would imply. Something like three and a half hours passed between hopping in a cab and ending up in the corrals. There was food and water, nervous pre-race chatter with my teammates, wandering around the athlete's village hoping to find... who knows what. However, it felt like five minutes. It all rushed by so quickly.
A shady spot. Sit.
Visualize one last time
How the day will go
I got to my assigned corral about 30 minutes before the race was to start. It was warm in the sun, but a big tree provided shade over a good portion of the road. A lot of other runners were sitting down there in the shade. I joined them, went through the race in my head. I don't think I've ever done that before - just sit down in the road and semi-meditate. It was nice and cool in the shade, and it calmed me down to just not be fidgeting. Some of that nervous energy came flooding back shortly though...
National anthem,
Choppers above, pistol fires
Yes! This is Boston!
Everybody runs
Before they cross the start line
There's no other choice
On a narrow road
A massive wave of people
Flowing down the hill
Mile two, runner down
The only choice, go over
Stumble, but survive
Here's where things began to diverge from the plan, though I didn't fully appreciate that until later. We were all moving along quickly, but packed in pretty tight even in the second mile. I don't really know what happened exactly - the first part went so fast. What I perceived was a runner in a white shirt dropping and rolling on the ground just ahead of me, and then there was a second guy in the air in front of me, going from right to left (presumably jumping over / trying to avoid the first guy, but really just cutting me off). My left leg caught on one or the other of them as I tried to make it through the spontaneous obstacle course. All that happened in real time, kind of blurry and out of focus.
Then the memory gets all Matrix bullet-timey on me, and I can see all the details. The road was coming up to meet my face, and my brain was hinting at the idea that I didn't have any other appendage in a position where it could meet the ground first. Somehow I managed to get my left toe down, which bought me enough time to get my right foot on the ground, and so on. I flailed my arms around a bit for comic effect before returning upright. I think that if we hadn't been going down a hill at the time, this would have turned out differently.
Adrenaline surge
Leg feels weird... relax, calm down
Find the groove again
I could feel a bit of a nag in my left leg for just a little bit, but it went away really quickly and I was back to normal. Normal, except that I was all hopped up on "please no, not in the face!" fumes, which is not really my ideal mental state this early in the race. All was going pretty well for several miles after this.
Eight miles, there's the pain
Change stride and push it aside
Try to maintain pace
I developed a sharp pain down my left leg when pushing off (or, more likely this is when the adrenaline from my near soul-kiss with the pavement wore off and I started noticing the pain). I shifted the way I was running so that it became more of a nagging background issue.
Halfway to the end
Can't keep favoring one leg
No way this can last
It was pretty clear to me at this point that my solution to the leg problem wasn't going to get me through the race. My right leg was doing more than its fair share of the running, and I could feel the muscles in both legs starting to get tense. My efforts to loosen things back up and relax seemed to just make it worse.
>>Hindsight - fyi this is more a "note to self" portion of the report. You can probably skip this part and not miss anything. I can see from my splits that I slowed down a little once the pain started, but not that much (about 5-10 seconds/mile). I felt I was still running nice and efficient. As far as my internal fuel gauge was concerned, I hadn't even started to make a dent. But my legs were becoming an issue. It is clear to me now that the things I use to gauge my effort level are based more on internal factors - probably related to cardiovascular cues - than to how my muscles are holding up. I don't think I have a real good awareness of what's going on in my legs. Something to think about. And now back to the regularly scheduled program...<<
Timing mats go by
Periodic reminders
People are watching
Sixteen - legs fatigued
Seventeen - painful uphills
Eighteen, nineteen - ouch
Over the next six miles or so, I really started having trouble. Going uphill was hard because I couldn't really avoid the sharper pains in my left leg on the hills. My right leg was starting to have its own share of painful stuff. I've described this to many people as muscle cramps, but I don't think that "cramps" is really the right word for it. I only had one real cramp the entire day, and that was not even during the race. It was after the race, while walking back to the hotel. One of those nasty bottom-of-the-foot ones that wake you up randomly in the middle of the night.
Anyway, my muscles weren't locking up. They were just going batshit crazy on me. They weren't firing at the right times or with the requested amount of force. For example, I'd go for a few steps pretty much fine and then suddenly my buttcheek would decide not to work as my foot hit the ground. My calf would try to make up for it by firing extra super duper hard, but way earlier than it needed to. It was really painful... but not really cramps.
The third hill breaks me.
My legs are failing. I walk.
First time in eight years.
I was in a pretty bad place when this happened. According to my watch data, I was on the 3rd of the Newton hills, though I could have sworn it happened 2 miles earlier. My left leg was killing me and my right leg wasn't being predictable at all, and then I was walking. It wasn't really a conscious decision. And I found that walking didn't hurt. As soon as I started walking, I wanted to keep doing it.
Seven miles to go
Them... the crowd will not abide
No, this is Boston.
The crowd at the Boston Marathon is amazing. They are loud. They are enthusiastic. There are thousands (and thousands!) of them in those last miles of the race. And they do not want to see you walking. It didn't take long before they got me going again. I had mixed feelings about that. I was both grateful for the mental boost and full of spite for the resulting pain. I did not want to run any longer.
I run... (mostly run)
I'm not the only "mostly"
Carnage everywhere
I ran most of the rest of the race, alternately cursing and thanking the crowds in my head. I took a few more walk breaks under similar circumstances. Both my legs eventually got in on the cramps-that-aren't-cramps insanity. Several times, one or both quads went on strike and I thought I might fall down. I had to stop a few times and just let my legs shake for a bit. But each time I managed to start putting one foot in front of the other again.
I was kind of between two worlds. One was full of people flying by me. The other was full of people dropping like flies. Even in my state I was passing a lot of other runners. Walking, cramping up, puking - there were lots of obvious heat-related issues. I've never seen that many people struggling in a race before.
I don't really think that much of what I was experiencing was due to the warm weather, but its possible that it made things worse. I don't know. I certainly wasn't overheated in the same way that many other people were. The sun in my face sucked, and I really wish I'd thought to wear a pair of sunglasses. But other than that, it was nice weather for a good stumble across Massachusetts. The predominant theory is that I simply wasn't going fast enough for my body temperature to get up in the bad zone.
I have already gone into way more detail than I really wanted to about the suffering part, and I'm going to stop there. The only other thing I want to really write about "in the race" is the weird (only in hindsight) moment when Cam passed me. Cam and I ran something like 90% of our training runs together for this race. 6 or 7 runs a week, every week. We've easily run a thousand miles together since November. He passed me somewhere in the last two miles of the race (neither of us can remember exactly where we were). He described the scene as something out of a war movie, where one soldier is trying to drag his dying buddy off the battlefield, and the other one is saying "No! Leave me! Save yourself!"
(what's so weird about that?)
That's just background. It's not the weird part. The weird part is that in all of those 26.2 miles, amidst 26,000+ runners, there was a stretch of maybe five to ten seconds where the two of us happened to be close enough to be seen together. And some official photographer just happened to be there too.
Weird. Maybe not as weird as the funny-shaped snowflakes in the picture (I don't remember it snowing), but weird nonetheless.
Eventually...
Done with my final Boston...
Until the next one.
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| Finish line photo: It's a long way from Hereford to there. |
So that's it. Needless to say, but the day did not go according to plan.
The plan, for the record, was to run solidly in the 2-fortysomething range. 2:48 to be specific. It was a challenging goal but one I thought (still think) I can get to.
Instead, I ended up running 3:13:07. A good 25 minutes slower than my goal, and nearly 20 minutes slower than I ran this race last year.
Am I disappointed? I'd be lying if I said no. I have been on a pretty good streak of Marathon PRs over the past two years, and I did not want that to end. And I've been focused on this one day - this one race - for the better part of the last six months. That's what you do when you train for these things. Gather up all the eggs, stick 'em in that basket.
But I'm also... not disappointed. I still went out and did the best I could under the circumstances. I'm still chalking this one up in the success column. Maybe I've got my bar for success set too low.
It's easy (natural, even) to start playing "whatif" after a race that didn't go as planned. I really don't like that game very much. The whatif's are usually about something that I didn't have any control over in the first place. And the answers are just pure speculation. It doesn't do much for me, though I do admit to playing the game anyway. On the other hand, I do like to break things down, figure out what I did well and what I can do better next time. But that's completely different. It takes place in an imaginary future instead of an imaginary past.
When it comes down to it, race day is what it is. Sometimes things go splendiferously according to plan. Other times, shit happens. You toss the plan out the window and you just have to improvise. And I'm sure a lot can go on - there's endless variations, leading to endless whatif's. But as long as I don't leave a race asking "What if I tried harder?" (I'm looking at you, 2009 Cap 10k!) then I'm pretty good with it. And I'm definitely not asking that question about this race.
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I normally post some splits right about here after the race report is all done, but this time I think a pace graph tells the story better.
Last, but not least, special thanks to Ashish, without whom this blog post would have fewer pictures.