OBX Marathon 08

OK, here’s the play by play.

I guess I’m happy enough that I PR’d, but it could have gone better! I had a horrible taper, missing all my usual preferred easy taper workouts and confidence builders, work was a fiasco last week standing all day on some new projects, and I even messed up my shoulder Friday doing some repetitive motion stuff. All sad excuses, but as a wannabe athlete it’s important to preface a story about your failures with a list of circumstances that don’t include the fact that you just plain old suck. So, by Friday night I was talking about not even running the marathon til Angie basically told me to tuck the string in and do it.

I woke up Sunday morning to a horribly sore shoulder – I couldn’t swing it in a running fashion any further aft than the plane of my torso. Not good. Plus, I had the “squirts.”

I told myself I would run at my target 3:15 goal marathon pace (even though I wasn’t sure I could even do it that fast), which is 7:30/mi, and if I gave out somewhere on the course early and had to quit then I could live with that. I set out with the GPS Forerunner to monitor pace and was clipping along a little fast at a 7:12ish pace for the first 5 miles. Too fast but it felt good, and the thought of banking some time early was rather appealing. Angie was there at mile 5 and I had told her that that would be the first chance to communicate to her that this 3:15 thing was actually doable. I gave her the thumbs up.

At mile 10 you enter the Nags Head Woods trail – where they have a very popular and tough 5k every year. This section tears you up mentally cuz it ruins your rhythm, it’s undulating and soft packed, and the last mile of it is on new mulch and the terrain is like running over a bmx course. I had prepared myself to lose major time in here and come out a little off the targeted 7:30 average pace. But I came out of those woods holding on at 7:27 average for the now 13 miles of running at that point.

It took about a half mile to regain my rhythm but I was doing well. At mile 18 I saw Angie again, the GPS said my average was now 7:29, and I could tell I was slowing down. I motioned for her to run with me for a sec and I told her 3:15 was out and I was now looking for a 3:20. She told me to stay positive. I picked up the pace and passed about 5 guys that had dropped me in the wood section. Clearly the hurting was affecting all of us.

At mile 20 – as you know, the halfway point – the wheels came off. I was still on target for a 3:15 marathon with the GPS saying my average was a 7:31 pace though. I was unglued and staring at the tall bridge that takes you back west onto Roanoke Island and the town of Manteo. My first year here, I walked that bridge. My second year, I ran up it like it was nothing. I questioned whether I could run it this time. I did, by looking straight down so as not to see how much of it was still ahead of me. I was running 8:30’s, then 9:00’s, then even slower. On the long straightaway into Manteo, I stopped to walk a few steps. Both legs buckled a la Paula Newbie Frazier and I went dizzy for just a sec. Whoa. It was hot, and my heart rate was racing. Walk to that 24 mi sign and then you can start running again.

I was now merely jogging and suffering miserably. I was however aware that the shoulder had not bothered me since I started the run 24 miles ago. I fixed it! The perfect cure to an ailment. Just run a marathon!

I ran by some spectator friends of Angie’s and mumbled “not feeling so swift” and they later told Angie I looked really pale. I saw Angie with about .25 miles to go and didn’t have the strength to smile or wave or anything. I distinctly remember clenching my teeth in pain at that point.

I crossed the line at 3:25:21, an 11 minute PR, and bent over in pain. A volunteer put her arms around me and before she could even ask I said, “I’m alright.” She said, “I know, but this is my job and let’s walk together.” She would not let me go, and helped me get the finisher medal on, the chip strap off, some water, and over to the food tent. I let a peanut butter sandwich hang in my mouth and sat on the asphalt for a while.

I had a thought during the grueling marathon leg of my Ironman earlier this year: if, when I did this fall marathon, I thought for once that doing “just a” marathon was tough or that it hurt I would personally kick my own butt. I have to admit, lately I’ve had the perception that after an Ironman, there isn’t much to a plain old marathon. That’s all wrong. A marathon still requires a badass chunk of respect to take on.

Oh yeah, and the shoulder pain came back immediately. I think I had forgotten that pain when other pains started in other regions of the body.