I ran my first marathon today after 5 months of training. Everything about the experience was pretty amazing. The race was unbelievably well organized and there as a huge support crowd all along the route. The weather was, in a word, perfect.
I learned a couple things about marathon racing today:
If you need to take a leak before the race and they are using chips to time you, go ahead. I lost over 2 minutes because I stopped at the first port-a-potties along the route and it took over 2 minutes to get back on the route.
Do NOT gulp the water along the route. At one point I got stomach pains that needed a good belch or two to relieve. After that, when I took water I slowed to a really slow jog an drank with as little air as possible. It helped.
Marathon runners come in all shapes and sizes. Sure, there were plenty of the people that probably don’t weigh 3 digits, but there were others clocking better times than I that I would never peg as marathoners.
… twas a wonderful experience and this I know
I´ll never go again to North Ontario!"
Anyway, congratulations on your achivement, I just started training for a 10 Km race and I still can´t wrap my head about how a human can run for 42 kilometers.
About 3 years ago I was running right around that same distance and never dreamed I’d ever run double digit miles. 6 months ago my longest run ever was around 10 or 12 miles and I thought a marathon would be impossible for me.
If you took a poll at the finish line, I’ll bet about 90 percent of the finishers would say that. If you took a poll a few days later, all of them would be saying, “Damn, if I’d just pushed a little harder, I could have knocked several minutes off my time. Oh well, next time…”
I said that every time I ran one, yet ended up doing ten of the things.
Not great, but I’ll take it. My first mile was 11 minutes (due to the potty break and traffic) and my last was 13 minutes. I was within 1/2 mile of the finish and my calves COMPLETELY cramped up. Otherwise, I consistenly ran 8:10 miles.
There was a PBS show on such topic a while back. Used males, but using just the outlines of thier hands without even seeing them, the “expert” was able to nearly predict the finishing order in a foot race. Nearly meaning of 5 runners (IIRC) he called 1,2 and 5 correctly but the 3 & 4 finishers were transposed.
Assuming there is something to this, that is about as good a result as I would expect: Correctly identifying the black and white cases, and not so good in the grey areas between.
Oh yeah, my ring fingers are more than 1/2" longer than my index fingers, but then at 6’5" tall, they are all really long.
Bad at all team sports because I don’t much care for the social aspects.
I was hoping for better than 4:00, so I’m pretty satisfied with the results. I’m certainly amazed I was able to even do this given where I was just 3 years ago.
What was your time in the NYC marathon?
How do you enter the NYC marathon? I know you need to qualify for Boston, but I’ve never heard how you get into the NYC one.
3:38? Dayum! That’s smoking!
Why’d you wait in line for a john - weren’t there any bushes, doorways or alleys around?
While I’m kinda glad I ran a marathon (4:00:52) immediately afterwards I felt that it had been a lot of time and effort in training just to go through 4 hours of hard work in a crowd of strangers.
A couple of weeks later I thought it was nice being able to run “sane” distances again and have weekends for something other than preparing for, training, and recovering from.
5 months later, when my knee started hurting, I stopped running completely.
A year later, after my knee was scoped, I figured one marathon was enough, and I enjoy my casual little 5 mile runs.
I recently started training for a sprint distance triathlon and I’m having considerable trouble with the runs. I can swim for an hour and barely stop, I can bike 15 or 20 miles in good time and feel like I’m just getting started, but even 3 9-minute miles will have me feeling like absolute crap and needing to take 2 days off. Running is brutal on my heels and knees, and I’m not overweight at all. At 6’5", 185lbs, I might be slightly underweight if anything.
