The key to all these numbers: 289 was my overall place out of 1189 who finished, 89/250 was my place among the guys in the 40-49 age bracket.
The 3:24 is the net time and the 3:25 is the start time: The chip system deducts the time it takes you to cross the start line from the total time.
The asterisk means that I qualified for the Boston Marathon. (Ask me later how I feel about that.) It was my formal goal for this race, but the idea of running a marathon is not really attractive right now.
The race went pretty much according to my plans. I have noticed from training runs that I really fade after 13-16 miles. So what I wanted to do was to run fast for the first 13 miles and get myself ahead of my 8 min/mile schedule. I was around 3 minutes ahead at 6, then 5 minutes ahead at 10 and about 10 minutes ahead by 16 miles. At this point I figured I had it in the bag: I had 10 miles to go and could do it at a 9 minute pace and still make 3:30. At 18 miles, nature showed she still had some trump cards. My left calf started to cramp. If you have ever had a leg cramp, you know that all talk of maintaining 9 minute miles is out, along with running at all, or even walking. The cramp never did develop but my legs felt like one mass of pulled and sore muscle. My pace deteriorated from there. I lost 5 minutes in the last 8 miles and would bet that half of that loss was in the last 2 miles.
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4 comments:
Congratulations on qualifying for Boston Marathon! Your time is really amazing for you could run a marathon in 3:25!
I am training for my Nov. 30 Tsukuba Marathon, but at this point, my goal is to FINISH it and hopefully below 4 hours.
Thanks!
In retrospect and now that I feel much better, I really enjoyed the race. Maybe not the last 5 miles, but that is less than one 5th of the total.
I don't think I could have finished the run if I had gone slower: I run out of steam at about 18 miles and have to slow down. My knees will only take 10 miles of slow pace before they start to hurt, so I have to run fast for at least 16 miles.
Fast is of course a relative term; we would have never considered 7:30per mile fast back in High School!
Good luck on your marathon, I have full confidence you will do great.
A BIG congrads on completing this. What a feat of human endurance! It is to be admired by all. I worry about the damage to the body though, humans are meant to run this far. Although, there is an amazing tribe in a remote corner of the world I was reading about that runs all the time and wears down their prey, absolutely fascinating and a big reason why we can learn extremely useful tips from these people today!
Thanks,
I don't know about humans being "meant" to run such distances. I am pretty old (46) and not really very talented (B-squad runner in High School) and I really didn't train all that hard. so, if I can run that far, humans must be pretty well suited to it.
We humans do lots of things that are pretty un-natural--like differential equasions for instance...
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