Posts Tagged ‘marathon’

I’m leaving tomorrow via an early train for what promises to be a 3-day rolling party.  Well, there is that race on Monday morning, but the social schedule is what has me most excited.  The only cloud on the horizon is my big toe returning to its under-the-nail shenanigans, but I’m hoping with tomorrow’s day off and tiny runs today and Sunday it’ll chill out for real.

Saturday
First stop is the hotel where I’ll hookup with Audra (my roomie for a couple nights), then on to the Expo.  Later that evening a huge-ass Runners World party.

Sunday
A 3-mile shakeout run with Audra, then brunch with the beautiful BQ babes.  Incredible to believe that we are embodying what that thread was started for in the first place – to get to Boston.  While a few gals won’t be attending this weekend, the majority will be representin’.

Immediately after, thanks to Stevi being an incredible event planner, I’ll meet up with a handful of my Sub 3:20 imaginary friends for a fun limo ride to Ron/ESG’s house for an afternoon of lunch, laughs and love.  I’m already grinning ear-to-ear in anticipation of this, it’s been one big belly-laugh with those guys, so I’m dying to finally hug and speak with them for real.

Then back to town to follow Jackie/HikerGirl to the race Pasta Party.

Monday
At 6:15, meet with the Sub 3:20 crew to board a bus for Hopkinton, wait around until 10am and then…begin The Boston Marathon.

Funny, I’ve been so blase about the race from an historical perspective, but now that it’s here, I’ve got this weird sensation of, well, pride!  Not for having qualified, but that I’m doing something my non-running friends recognize and understand as something.  It’s kind of fun.  Hell, I might even buy a jacket.  Maybe.

Monday night is another large dinner with the Sub 3:20 crew and their families, then Tuesday morning, train back to Philly.  Like I said, one big 3-day party.

Tracking and Corny Sentimentality
If anyone wants to track my ass, my bib# is 13897 and you can do it live online by going to the B.A.A. site or sign up for alerts.  Looking for 3:24ish (if the weather is uneventful), but anything around that vicinity will work.

I’ll probably take my laptop so hopefully will check in afterward with a mini update but if not, expect something on Tuesday night.

I want to wish all my fellow racers Good Luck this weekend!! I hope to meet many of you somehow within that mess of humanity but if I don’t, have a strong, beautiful and wonderful race.  No regrets, no pain (well, as little as humanly possible) and memories you want to replay for a long, long time.  Or if you prefer, have a fabulous drunken weekend!!!

As for you guys and gals who read this blog and have been witness to all the trials, tribulations and whining I’ve managed to produce these last few months on the way to this particular event, I will never be able to thank you enough.  You support me, keep me honest, give me something to strive for and something to be afraid of if I fuck up. :-)  Love you guys.  You’ll be with me on the course.

Peace.

Where to start?  I won’t go into detail about the FE (forum encounter) except to say these women are as smart, savvy, funny and beautiful as I imagined and as yesterday’s photos illustrate.  It was truly a special gathering of old and new friends.

Afterward brunch and expo, then Kat and Audra come back to my place since they were staying with me.  I was so glad they were there, I was able to almost forget about the race and felt in capable hands since they’ve got a lot of marathons between them.

Race morning: Up at 5:15, slug some coffee and my usual peanut butter bread w/banana  and get myself ready.  I gave my bag for bag check to the girls who offered to carry it so I wouldn’t have to deal with checking it in.

Perfect weather for a race: 44 – 51 and sunny.  I’ve got sunglasses on my head, small water bottle in my hand, socks for arm warmers (which I discard after the 1st mile) and 4 gels.

Get to the race area and slide right into my corral (advantages of living 10 minutes from the start line).  I’m feeling good, I tell myself this is my day and I believe it.  Gun goes off.

First mile 7:53 was slower than I wanted due to the crowd but I’m not worried, lots of time to make that up.  The next few miles are pretty much on 7:30 pace but I know it’s not matching my paceband (which accounted for the course elevation, so indicated faster miles here).  I decided to ignore my paceband from that point on and just listen to my body.  I wanted to try to be as non-negative as possible, though not entirely successful, ignoring the paceband helped.

Mile 8 had a meaty uphill and my pace slowed to 7:50.  Mile 9 had another hill and I handled it ok but knew I was probably slower than what the paceband would have had me do.  At this point, I just said fuck it and told myself to “run within yourself”.  I was already figuring the sub 3:17 was toast and I didn’t want to feel pressured into running badly to make it happen.   Wish I’d stuck to that.

I get out on Kelly Drive, feeling alright, then the 3:20 pace group comes up from behind moving faster than I am.  I kind of panic seeing how fast they’re going compared to me (I still thought I was in 3:20 land at this point), so I decide to hang on, though I have to speed up some to keep up.  That was a major mistake.

The pace leader, incidentally, is an RW forumite as well, Pacer Chris, though he had no idea I was there and wouldn’t have known me if he’d seen me.  Nice guy, great pace leader too.  I follow him for a couple miles and up the last real hill, Lemon Hill, and I can tell my HR is just way higher than it should be.  I hear the people around me talk and they’re very relaxed while I’m not – this is not good.  So at mile 14.5 I sadly let them go and return to running my own race.  But by now I know it’s too late, this is going to be a looooong race.

Mile 16 is 7:56 (there are no hills here, I just can’t move faster), mile 17 is 8:16.  There aren’t any spectators for this portion which makes it very easy to berate myself for realizing that while I want to be competitive in this sport, I’m really just a Giver Upper, I don’t have the “dig deep” gene that a real racer has.  I’ve always felt this though, so it’s nothing new, just good to rub it in when I’m feeling low.

Mile 18 is 8:25.  I reflect at how, for my first marathon last year, this was to be my race pace (which totally got mangled, just as this one was).  Somehow this is amusing and very sour at the same time.  At 18.75, with labored breathing and the knowledge that my effort cannot continue, I take my first walking steps.

It feels like sweet relief, my body getting itself back into a manageable machine, albeit somewhat broken.  On a strangely positive note, I’d already reached Giver Upper stage but had accepted it, so I didn”t even feel bad anymore about my lost goal, it was a done deal so what was I going to do about it?  I know I’ve totally screwed this race so all I can do is try to make it end however I can, which means I end up run/walking the rest of the entire fucking race.

Luckily, I have a Sub 3:20 thread pal’s “voice” ringing in my head, Chris, who told me to relax about PRs and just have fun, so thanks to him and Zab (who sent the sweetest good luck note, also saying “have fun”), I decided that I would not make this a multi-mile self-flogging.  I was going to enjoy what I had and smile.  The new A goal was to get a marathon PR, knowing I could crawl it in at this point – at least that was a given.

I also made a mini-goal to keep me moving, and that was to try and keep my pace no slower than 9min, so I’d walk until I needed to get the time back in order, then run a tiny bit (not even 2 minute stretches, I don’t think) then walk again.  I knew the 3:30 pace group would eventually catch up to me and was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have to see 3:40, but I was pretty much all Fuck It at this point.

I did see a couple of my Women’s BQ pals since there was a long turnaround but couldn’t yell hi back because I’d lost my voice completely, all I had left was a squeak.  So the Manayunk portion was endless but I kept smiling and managed to find some humor out of this ridiculous situation.

I ended up covering a lot more ground than 26.22 because tangents were no longer in my guidebook, I had to stick to the right side of the road so I could stay out of the other runners way.

Oh, and the bibs were funny, they had our names on them and unlike Steamtown, when someone said, “you can do it” or “woohoo,  great job” and I just wanted to punch them since I was so obviously struggling, this time I thought it was really sweet when people called my name and I waved or smiled in thanks, though kept feeling as if I’d let them down when I began walking again.

At mile 25-something I saw my girls screaming for me, Kat yelled something about where we were supposed to meet but I didn’t hear.  I was running when I passed them and wondered if they saw me start walking a bit afterwards.  They knew it was bad anyway since I was so behind at this point, but I was actually feeling pretty good, all things considered (mentally, I mean…my feet hurt and my left shin was aching).

As I neared the museum with about 1/2 mile to go, the cutest thing happened.  People were loving saying my name, maybe because it’s a funny waitress name, but as I started the last rise I started walking again (seriously, I did that shit for 8 miles) a guy yells out, “c’mon Flo, it’s just 1/4 mile to the top of the hill and you’re there” and there were tons of spectators lining the course, so I waved to the guy, wry grin on my face and started running.  Both sides of the crowd started screaming like crazy “yay Flo, wooohoo, Go Flo”, it was surreal.  I’ve always said I didn’t care about crowd support but this was something so special, I was grateful like nothing you can believe.

I made it up the rise and I’m really ready to get this party over with so I pick up the pace and of course, at this very point, I feel the Bear knocking on the door.  For my non-running friends, the Bear is when you want to shit.  I have never, not one single time, in any of my training runs experienced the Bear.  But now, when I’m just .25mi from the finish of hell-race, all I can think about is holding my damn sphincter so tight, I could have strangled a baby with my ass.  Thankfully (because that would have really been a dramatic finish with or without the baby), I kept the Bear at bay.

I came in at 3:33:59.

So I hobble to a pretzel and am actually amazed that with all that walking the time wasn’t that bad.  I’m feeling pretty good about the craziness of the situation and can’t wait to see my girls and talk about it.

But I can’t find them.  They have my clothes and my apartment keys.

I end up walking back and forth for an entire hour looking for them.   We were all so dumb for not having a plan, I guess we all figured it’d be pretty easy to find each other but there thousands of people.  At one point I went to the med tent because I was so cold and asked if I could just stand there for a bit.  I borrow the medic guy’s phone to call Nick thinking he has keys to my apartment, plus I left my phone at home so then I could call Audra or Kat and find them that way but he wasn’t answering.

I start getting really depressed and wondering what the hell to do.  I was freezing and tired of being on my feet so finally, I found a bit of curb in a middle area and sat, just hoping they’d find me.  Like an angel, Nina (one of the Women’s BQ babes) finds me and immediately calls the others like a cop would, “I’ve got her!”  She gives me her jacket and I start blubbering.  All the tension from the race and me feeling lost and helpless just spilled out.

Of course, it turns out we were all going to the same places, just a few steps behind each other so in no time at all, we’re assembled, the girls hold the space blanket around me and I change in the middle of the throng, feeling much better and warm.  We walk to a bar for the apres race gathering (thanks Caroline, you really did a stellar job of all the event planning) and have a great time rehashing.

Everyone is insanely supportive as I know you, my readers, will be.  And I was in a great mood after I’d had a Bloody Mary in me, but walking back home, the fatigue and the weight of a failed race became very heavy.  My “lemonade out of lemons” feeling that I’d managed to hold on to throughout the hardest part of the race was gone.  I just felt and still feel sad.

There are things I realize, like it’s only my 2nd marathon so I shouldn’t be so disheartened, and whatever my body’s been up to these last couple months with the HR was something that wasn’t going to magically disappear even if I did find the cause.  The worst part is this feeling of unease of what does it all mean? Where am I, fitness-wise?  Have I been fooling myself?  Was I pushing the workouts in a false way?  It’s painful to think of these things but to simply say “naaa” is just being an ostrich about it.

My immediate plan was to do like last year and spend the next few weeks playing around with 5K workouts and going for a new 5K PR, but I’m feeling so empty right now, like I can’t fight another fight, even if it’s only 3.1 miles. I feel like my training is one big question mark.  But I’ll get over it.  Glass half full, that’s me.

For my friends, I’m going to hibernate tonight, I don’t want to talk to anyone, so sorry for the unreturned messages and phone calls,  I know you get it.  You know what I hate though?  Is now you’re all going to be so sweet and do like I do when I read a crappy race report, be “great job considering you had to walk blah blah”.  But being on this end of it, I just feel a little pathetic about it.  So tell me I suck. It’ll make me feel better.

P.S. I want to say hi to Jhowdy, who I saw on the course looking fine, Christine, who was flying, Dave, who was also looking great, JoeShmoe who gave me a needed hug at around mile 23 and thank you Amy (my new self-appointed niece) who gave me the most incredible banana bread and some scented recovery salts in which I just took a long bath – they’re fantastic!  Plus all the wonderful BQ Babes: Kat and Audra (my personal race crew), Mir, Tara, Nina, Mary, Amy, Lynn, Jo, Caroline, Jo, Fran, mm64 (sorry for the name forgetting!) and their most excellent hubbies who managed to hang with the chicks and fit right in. Also, a shoutout to Robert, a fellow blogging pal I finally got to meet at the Expo.  What a cool culture, this running thing.

Edit: Lest you guys think I’m still in a funk, I’m not!!  I felt A-OK the next morning.  Read the next entry, Race Wrap Up for my thoughts on the whole thing.

Our most beautiful Women’s BQ thread babes.

OK kids, this is it until tomorrow.  Whhheeeeeeee……