I got up really early and ran a marathon today. I only did a minute and a half better than last year, but I felt a lot better at the end. I wasn’t dying, and my right leg didn’t cramp up. It did feel tight a few times, and I had to run up hills carefully, but it never cramped. It helped a lot to go slowly at the start. I could have gone slower, but I think that would have backfired on me; I would be out running for longer and getting worse.
My time was 3:43:20. I placed 48th out of 301 runners who finished. My goal was 3:30:00, but I’m okay with missing it. I had a pace calculator that indicated I should have gone faster, and I’m glad I ignored it. I wasn’t doing too badly at the halfway point, getting there in 1:47:50, but, well let’s face it, in the second half I was tired.
The weather-wise, it was hot. Thankfully, for the first half it was overcast. I think it drizzled a few times. In the second half, you really felt it when the sun was out.
Getting to the race was interesting. I got up before the crack of dawn and a friend, also running it, drove me down there. He had a GPS guidance system that was supposedly telling us how to get to the start line. First it told us to turn where there was no street. When we didn’t it offered an alternate route, turning right onto 55st. We did that and found it dead-ended after twenty meters, where it turned into a running path. Eventually we got there with only one more weird route. The theory is that because we hadn’t docked the unit, it didn’t realize it was in a car. It was trying to find routes for pedestrians. Apparently very fast moving ones.