For Whom the Dogs Bark

Boston weather forecast for tomorrow at the finish, 47F, 21 mph headwind and driving rain.  Couldn’t be happier about my life right now.

I found a headband and gloves at the expo (there was a run on them, I think I may have gotten the last pair).  Also have a banana, bagel/crème cheese and baked plain potato chips for in the morning.  Eating cold pizza right now, decided that is better than traipsing around any more looking for a last carb fix.  Don’t know what else I could possibly do, other than run another one when conditions are more reasonable, like 80F and bright sun, with rising steam from a recent thunderstorm -- that would be more my type of race.  

There are people still running the sidewalks here in their marathon shirts, less than 18 hours from the start.  They don’t seem to understand that training is over.

Sleep tight everybody, I know I will, since my fate is already decided.

PR by about 2 minutes today.  3:28:34, half in 1:43:45, so lost only one minute on the second half. 

Late on Monday night here.  Conditions in the early evening are 47F, still raining, ENE 14.  It was similar to that out on the course, except the wind was higher according to reports (somebody said 20 mph gusting to 30, don’t know how accurate that is).  But I don’t think the wind slowed me down by more than 2 minutes, just hard to tell, though I do know that a tailwind would have pushed me through rather nicely.  Perusing the elite results (one of whom is on our blog), I see that times were several minutes slower this year, so maybe the wind had more effect than I realized.  For my part, my legs just did their thing and pretty soon I was at the finish line.  Totally hypothermic, however, took several hours of shivering in bed to finally get warm.

It was a very good day for me.  I feel like I pushed the sun up a little bit on the western horizon, for at least this one day.  I had a bad attitude about the weather, because I thought it would probably prevent me from getting the PR that I had put in the work to get.  My attitude got even worse on the way up, when it started raining on our bus, rain wasn’t supposed to start until noon.  But everybody stuck with the program, all the waves started like clockwork.  The village was quite a scene, runners shivering in the tents while anti-terrorist squads roamed the school rooftop.

My wave started right at 10:50 and I was across the line about 5 minutes after that.  I noticed right away that I was running with young women and old men.  All the young men, by definition, were a lot further up in the queue.  As is typical for races like this, I started to feel better once we got going.  The first mile was a mess, however, no room to maneuver at all.  At one point somebody clipped my trailing foot and I almost went down.  Looked at my watch at the half-mile point and it showed an 8:50 pace, I knew I had to be a little more proactive in finding lanes to run in, and managed to get the first mile down to 8:20, which was acceptable.  Another thing that was going on was higher than expected heart rate; it is still a mystery to me why it always goes up on race day.  I had it in the low 50s sitting in the tent, but it was immediately in the 160-165 range from the beginning.  But it held steady and I felt good, so I went with it.  That said, today was definitely a day when I needed the discipline of my watch, both to speed up and to slow down, as well as to maintain a steady effort level by monitoring my heart rate. 

My Garmin splits weren’t matching the official mile markers.  Part of it is that it is hard to run tangents on this course with all the crowds, but there weren’t a lot of tangents and I did a reasonably good job of it.  But by the halfway point I knew I had to average in the low 7:50s to break 3:30.  Luckily I was able to do that.

First miles were mostly downhill, but not all, a couple of rollers just to remind us of what was to come.  Then pretty much rollers after that through the half.  Halfway through mile 11 my left shoelace came loose, unbelievably.  I had to sit down on the curb and tie it, lost at least 25 seconds doing that, based on splits.  Took a gulp of water shortly after that and another one at mile 22.  They were preaching hydration, but if I’m not thirsty I don’t drink, that’s the way it’s always been, no need to change it on a cold rainy day.

But my legs were doing their thing, just pumped out the miles.  About 8 miles in I realized that they had 30 miles in them.  Wasn’t quite so sure about that at the top of the Newton Hills, but they had enough left in them to get me in.

Went through the Wellesley scream tunnel running in the middle of the road with my head down, emerged with my honor intact.  Not sure the course profile was right for the Newton hills.  They started right on schedule after the 16-mile mark and lasted a full 5 miles, all as advertised.  Supposedly there are only 4 of them, but I read it wrong or they counted wrong, because I think there were at least 6 significant climbs and a few minor ones.  Heartbreak was gut check time.  I tried to maintain a little bit of turnover, pumped my arms a lot and probably lost only about 20-25 seconds in mile 21.  There were people walking up the hill who had better PRs than I do based on their bib numbers, some of them much better.  I couldn’t fathom just giving up my race like that, so I kept going.  The crowd at this point was my favorite.  They knew what was going on, almost as if they had done it themselves, and they were extremely supportive.  If I ever by-stand this race that is where I am going to station myself.

I had promised myself when I got to the top of Heartbreak that I would find the courage to race it in no matter how I felt, and indeed I got good splits for mile 22 and 23.  I couldn’t maintain it, but never slowed down dramatically.  Most of the runners in my wave lost it going up the hills.  I was passing almost as many runners almost as I did in the second half of SGM 2013, both going up and coming down the other side.  I decided that I didn’t care if I threw up at the finish line or before, I was taking this one on in, I knew I had a PR by that point if I could maintain some semblance of a pace.  When I made the left onto Boylston I was ecstatic.  My name was announced at the finish line, although Nike hasn’t called just yet.  Me and one other old guy had our hands on our knees and moisture in our eyes that wasn’t from the rain. Knuckle bumps and we were on our separate ways back to our lives in the office.

Splits:  1: 8:20 (164); 2: 7:55 (173); 3: 7:34 (161); 4: 7:37 (162); 5: 7:59 (163); 6: 7:46 (163); 7: 7:48 (163); 8: 7:55 (163); 9: 7:48 (162); 10: 7:50 (165); 11: 8:13 (165); 12: 7:40 (165); 13: 7:47 (166); 14: 7:43 (167); 15: 7:58 (167); 16: 7:33 (167); 17: 8:05 (169); 18: 8:04 (170); 19: 7:49 (168); 20: 8:06 (169); 21: 8:17 (171); 22: 7:35 (170); 23: 7:45 (169); 24: 7:54 (168); 25: 7:54 (167); 26: 8:19 (167); 26.22: 7:44 (167) (0.22); 26.50: 6:03 (168) (0.28)  Overall:  3:28:34, 167 bpm. 

First shakeout run since racing.  No watch but felt very good, though not ready yet to start training again.

75F, 95%, swirling wind.  Heard a little bit of thunder but went out anyway.  Quickly saw that was a bad idea, it started raining hard and was coming down in sheets when I finally got back to the house after 2.5, dodging lightning bolts.  (Garmin is broken, probably from getting rained on for four hours at Boston, can't get it started no matter what hard reset or soft reset I try.)  Shortly after I returned a strong cell came through, 60 or 70 mph winds, so good thing I quit.  Retired to the neighborhood gym and ran 7.5 on the TM while my daughter did weights.  I started at 6.7 mph and ended up at 9.0 mph for the last half mile.  Still feeling good, easing back into a routine.  I am very thankful I made it to the starting line healthy and am still healthy.

I did some calculations to see how fast my race would have been on a regular course on a regular day.  I compared my starting bib number to my finishing place, corrected for no-shows (about 10%) and reserved bib numbers (about 3%), which gave me an approximate number of runners passed.  Then "assigning" myself to a higher corral as if I got a bib number equivalent to the runners I finished with, and based on the qualifying times of those runners based on their corral placement, I probably would have run about 3:22, which is what I thought I might be capable of if everything went well.  (The other thing is the course was 100 seconds long, but it is Boston and they get to do that -- measurements weren't that accurate in 1897.)

Next target race is a half marathon in October in Susanville, CA, my wife's home.  It has some altitude but is also gradual downhill, which I think makes it somewhat equivalent to a sea-level course for a guy like me going up to altitude.  More importantly, the tempertature should be fine.  I have some PR-type goals for it, but still honing a training plan.  I was planning to go back to Grand Rapids to run the 25K in May, but I think doing that might interrupt training too much.