PDX Marathon

A medal, a pendant, and a coin! All that for jogging 26.2 miles!

 At the beginning of this year I signed up for the Portland Marathon. I had been running a little bit and things were going well. I had gained weight in the last two years that I wanted to lose again, and I still felt I should be able to run a marathon under four hours, based on my Dublin Marathon experience. Having a goal would make me go out and exercise, even when work was hectic and other life events interfered.
 It sounded like a good plan nine months ago and things got off to a good start. I now have run more than a thousand miles this year. More than double of what I have done in any year before. (And infinity more than the 0.0 miles in each of the first 46 years of my life.) The weekly milage chart below shows that there were some gaps and setbacks, though.

My runs this year so far

 During late Spring and in the Summer we were looking for houses, found one, bought it, and then moved. Some weeks with no running at all, and others with only a couple of short ones. Then in late August and September my Achilles tendon flared up again. I have been spared that excruciating pain for more than a year, but jumping into a high-mileage regimen in August instead of ramping up properly, was probably the cause.
 Earlier in the year I had high hopes to come in well under four hours. Despite the training lapses during the Summer and the injury in Fall, I was still optimistic and did not adjust my target time. Which, in hindsight, is an easy mistake to spot. The two taper weeks before the race were excruciating. No extra runs at this point would help -- to the contrary -- and my Achilles tendon was only slowly healing. I spent the time obsessing over my race day pacing strategy.
 The goal was to stick with the 3:45 hour pacing group, start conservatively, and fall back, if necessary. This should have left me with plenty of time before the four-hour mark at the end.
 Other than having to get up really early, race day started out fine. I was in my starting coral about 30 minutes before the gun went off, ready to go. At the expo, the pacers had handed out wrist bands with the pace and target time for each mile. The pace was adjusted for the terrain and even effort throughout the race. Using FindMyMarathon.com, I had created my own bands for times between 3:45 and 3:59.
 When we took off, I felt like we were going way too fast right away. That's not supposed to happen. After training and taper, the body is supposed to be well rested, fuelled, and full of adrenaline and endorphins. At the beginning of the marathon, things should be easy, you are supposed to find a steady-effort pace, and concentrate very hard on going much slower than you feel you can and want to go. Instead, I was trying to keep up with the pacer and trying to figure out why I was breathing so heavily.

Click to enlarge

 The first mile was way too fast. By mile 2 we had gone uphill a little bit and I slowed down. This was not a pace I could keep up for several more hours. At mile 4 I could still see the pacer but had fallen back quite a bit. There was nothing conservative about this start and I began to make plans to slow down even more, let the pace group go, and settle into a more reasonable pace for me.
 Then all of a sudden my right hamstring cramped. I had visions of Dublin all over again. Nothing else hurt, but I had to slow down, experiment with my gait, stretch, and try to find a middle ground between making progress while keeping the pain in check and not making it worse.
 By the half marathon mark it was still painful, but I felt I could speed up again.  Unrealistically, I started to hope for something near 3:50 again. It didn't click that I was looking at the conservative start plan with a negative split. This is where I should have started to speed up. Instead, I decided to take it relatively easy -- I was afraid that pushing now would bring the cramps back -- conserve energy to mile 22 and then race with whatever I had left. The next four miles felt good, but of course were way too slow.

Two runners deep inside the rose. I think I'm the left one.

  I didn't realize that, and am not sure I could have gone much faster, without bonking near the end, but I probably should have tried. By mile 22 the 4:00 pace group had caught up with me.  They had started several minutes behind me, so that was bad news. It felt just like Dublin.  I sped up and kept with them. It felt very fast and I wasn't sure I could keep that up for another four miles. Plus, I had to be faster than them to reach 4:00.
 I was able to pull ahead for a while, passing tons of people -- being passed too. But it didn't last. On the Broadway bridge the 4:00 group was right behind me again. Between 25 and 26 they passed me and looking at my own start time and the feeling in my feet, I realized I could not make the four hour mark. I slowed down.  This was not worth the pain, although I wanted to do better than Dublin.
 Three years older and four minutes faster. OK, but still a little bit disappointing.  I did feel a lot better at the end of this one, then in Dublin. No blisters this time, but I think I added two black toe nails to the one I started with.
 I think I can do 4:00 with proper pacing. Maybe even 3:55, but the strategy needs to be conservative start with the expectation that I cannot do a negative split. To the contrary!! I also don't want to spend training another year just to try, and it would be nice to get below four hours around my 55th birthday. There are a few more marathons this year on the West coast. Maybe I'll try one more time.
 

At least I'm faster than Midsy.

 Results: Time 4:04:48 (unofficial), average pace was 9:21 per mile. I was 94/252 in my age group of M50-54, 1,092/2,709 of all males, and 1,619/5,500 overall. My age grade for this race is 58.06%. This is a method where 100% is world record level for a given event and takes into consideration your age and gender to calculate how well you did. It is meant to allow comparisons among all participants.