Start time: 10/30/05, 8:45am
Location: The Marine Corps Marathon
Distance: 26.2 miles
Finishing time: 4:57:34
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1 through mile 19, then… 4:1 if I was doing well
Average pace: 11:21min/mile
Ok… and now, the moment of truth (or perhaps wincing at part)… my mile splits. See if you can see exactly where everything went south!
01 — 12:06
02 — 12:21
03 — 11:13
04 — 10:29
05 — 10:48
06 — 10:51
07 — 10:53
08 — 10:07
09 — 10:49
10 — 10:30
11 — 10:00
12 — 9:56
13 — 10:25
14 — 10:01
15 — 10:33
16 — 10:50
17 — 11:00
18 — 11:18
19 — 11:42
20 — 11:44
21 — 12:18
22 — 12:37
23 — 12:32
24 — 13:17
25 — 13:26
26 — 12:27
26.2 — 3:09
Mile 08: Mark took the lead of the group there and I was running with Julie. This is, frustratingly in hindsight, exactly where we lost each other. The group was starting to pull away, Julie said not to hang back… and I caught up with Mark and the front of the group in time to hit the marker and realize that we’d gone much faster than planned.
Miles 11-14: Everything was going perfectly to our plan, here. And then… suddenly… Oof.
Mile 20: I’d already switched to the 4:1 here and for a mile, almost nothing had changed. I hadn’t picked up any speed but I wasn’t losing any ground either.
Mile 21: And then the forever uphill stretch of the 14th Street Bridge hit. And then some. I felt like I was face-plowing into the pavement and I never recovered.
Mile 24: Funny story here. I had to go to the bathroom as soon as the race started. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I used an empty port-a-potty. I remember looking at the time when I entered and left and noted that it was exactly 40 seconds. I was then fairly convinced that my finishing time would be somewhere between 5:00:01 and 5:00:39 and this bathroom stop would’ve been the reason why. Well, it wasn’t… but if you subtract those 40 seconds? It would’ve been 12:37. This makes me laugh only because I was convinced each mile was slower and slower.
Mile 25: And this is where, going up a ramp, my legs started cramping like mad and I suddenly had a brief horrible thought of, “I don’t think I can run anymore.” (I could, thankfully. It passed.)
Last but not least, keeping in mind that “did not finish” runners are not in the list (and by all reports that’s quite a few) my statistics were overall #11280 out of 19122, and for men 30-34 #1201 out of 1749. STILL the bottom third of my age bracket. Bah!
On the brighter side, October was officially my highest mileage month ever: 103.2 miles. That just makes me smile.
Thanks for putting the split times, it helps tell the marathon story without the narative.
We are in the HARDEST age group right now. The 30-39 age group. It is where the runner becomes Serious about running and trains more and relies less on raw ability. I generally do no better than 5th in my age group for most of the races here and in the 50% percentile for marathons and longer runs. SIGH…
Next year, you should adjust your run/walk to 7:1, 8:1 or run faster 5:1 intervals. I think you have the ability now to do that, else you’ll never make it to 4:30 (which I think you could do)
One thing that I noticed was that you never had a horribly slower mile (greater than 1 minute difference). It was a fairly steady slow-down in the last miles, which, unless you are pulling negative splits is something that you like to see. Even when you have your 13 minute miles, you still didn’t slow down all that much between the miles and even dropped a minute off the 26th mile. What I see there is the anticipation of the finishline. If you had done that say at mile 14 then you’d have some consistency problems in pacing (like I do) but your training teaches you how to run a set pace.
Congrats on your 100+ mile month. I had one of those a long time ago… pretty fun and exhausting. I can’t imagine having a 100 mile week!
Mile 24 – when you need to go, you should go. Holding in for that long uses the bladder muscles and you are better off to do it early to keep with pace than to do it later when you have stopped and are tired to try to make it back to the proper pace. I know this one from experience (my first one in 1999)
Yeah, I’ll definitely be doing a larger run ratio next year. If I train with the 9:30 group then that’s a 7:1 if my memory serves me; I really don’t think that’ll be a problem.
I think the #1 problem above all else was having to expend so much energy (mental and physical) on the crowds. Even when we broke free of them in Georgetown, they kept coming back. I’d run a crowded 10K once (the Capitol Hill Classic 10K) but it was nothing like this. I burnt way too much energy weaving and zig-zagging and it cost me big time.
In retrospect I should’ve just peed on the side of Spout Run like everyone else! 😉