114th Boston Marathon

First about the race. It was amazing. In a long race, it is easy to let the mind drift, think about how much it hurts, and slow down. In Boston, there was always something to keep me distracted from those thoughts. Crowds were stacked rows deep nearly the entire way. Lots of runners my speed, so I was never in the middle of nowhere with only a few people around. Organization and scenery were top notch. 490 port o pots at the start. F-15's fly over before the gun went off. Water and Gatorade at every mile on both sides of the road. It will be hard to do another marathon now that I've experienced Boston.

Now about how I did. I felt like I could of killed it. The goal when training was sub 3 hours. at that pace (6:52), training was going a lot easier than it did last year when my goal was 3:10. (7:15 pace). However, I wanted insurance that the race would go well. This is not the course to gamble on by going out at the pace you "think" you can do. So I set my goal in the 3:05 to 3:08 range. Running the first half at 6:55 pace and expecting to slow down during the hills around miles 16-21 to 7:10 to 7:20 pace would still give me a PR. That plan worked for about 21 miles. Mile 16 I let the pace slip above 7:00 for about 1/2 mile when I took a gel. Before mile 17 the pace (over the last mile) was back to 6:59. The next few miles were above 7:00, but within goal and felt fine. At mile 21 the hard hills were done, but so were my legs. Walking felt really good, and running hurt a lot. At this point I made up my mind to never run another marathon. Sub 3:10 was still within reach, but I didn't want to come back in 2011. I told myself that if I was at the finish line in time to qualify for next year, I'd stop and wait for a 3:11 to ensure I could not.

Doubtful that I would of kept that promise to myself, but we'll never know. With 2.2 mile to go, the gun time was over 3 hours. Chip time was only 2:57, but I didn't know that because my Garmin died. Less than a month after the 1 year warranty expired and it's useless now. I didn't care about the Garmin and I didn't plan on running 2.2 mile in 10 minutes or 13 minutes. It was all I could do to slug out 10 min miles for those last 2 miles. Finish time was 3:18:16.

I've been pondering what went wrong since mile 21. Most likely nothing went wrong. The result is simply what I'm in shape to run on that course on that day. However, next time I'm going to have workouts like I did in 2009. For those training runs I had to quit running because I couldn't maintain my race pace for the goal distance during my long runs. This year I did them all, and only one really tested my fitness.

Nutrition
Before race: 2 ensures, 1 banana, 12 oz water.
During race: GU Roctane with water at miles 6, 11, 16. Gatorade at miles 20, 22, and 24.

Ready for Boston

The work is done, and now it's time for the fun part. Today I checked Boston's weather forecast for the first time. Supposed to be cloudy and high of 50 on Monday with a 30% chance of showers. I can work with that.

Plan is to go out at 6:55 pace. I want to hit halfway needing a neg split in order to break 3:00. Primary goal is NOT sub 3:00. The goal is to avoid screwing up the end of the race by going out too hard. There's other races out there to gamble on. I've invested too much on this one.

Here's the breakdown of my running 19 weeks before the marathon.