So I am officially scared. I am worried that I won’t make it to the bridge of the Marine Corp Marathon and will be shipped off the course on a bus. I did a 13 mile training run this past weekend and it was a very difficult run in many way. I chose a difficult path with large hills to simulate the hills we had to go up in the beginning of the race last year. I hadn’t anticipated those hills last year, and when I was climbing the what seemed like a never-ending hill that reminded me of the heartbreak hill, my balloon burst early on in the race. It took a lot out of me.
This year the rules are changing for the marathon. When you reach “the Gauntlet” at mile 17 you have to make it through by 12:33 p.m. or you will be diverted from the Certified course and won’t be recognized as an official finisher. You MUST cross the 14th Street Bridge by 1:36 p.m. This is different from last year where the requirement was to make it to the entrance of the Bridge.
So to start to prepare my mindset for what is ahead of me for the rest of my training and to also be successful with this race, I had to work on some data analysis. I sat down with a map of the course and printed out my splits from last year’s race to see where I was slowing down. I also needed to know where the elevation was increased and compare that to my splits to see if the hills had a significant impact on my speed. Ironically, the hills weren’t areas that I noticed problems.
At the beginning of the race, we sort of detoured from the rest of the crowd and our first mile was 14 minutes. The second mile is the hilliest mile and yes we did slow down there. But my weak areas came when I was mentally challenged. It is recommended by the Marine Corps Marathon, that in order to beat the bridge you need a 14 minute mile. I figured I had done several marathons before and that wouldn’t be a problem. Well, I didn’t figure I would be burnt out before the race even started so I didn’t maintain that pace. There was a bathroom break and I did stop at the medical tent so that does show up in the splits.
I am training much harder this year to make sure that I am including long hills early on in my training runs. As you can see from the elevation map on my last long run I climbed quite a few large hills, much larger than the hill at the MCM.
As you can see from the splits, the climb up the large hill (on a very hot, sunny, humid day) was my slowest mile. Mile 7 is where I stopped off at home to refresh my ice and neck wrap. But my average pace for fhe first 9 miles on such a challenging, hot long run was decent. I’d like to get it a little lower however. Miles 12 and 13 I had just run out of gas. I was very overheated. I was just brutally hot out and I don’t believe I had enough fuel on board with me to get this done effectively.
Yes, I am scared, but I am going to work on my strength and am hoping the weather will break soon and I can get in some long runs at a cooler temperature.
On the bright side I was listening to Another Mother Runner podcast about mental training and also Sarah and Molly were talking about throwing a wish out to the universe to find a quarter. But during my run I did find a shiny penny! So I said out loud that I wanted to find silver coins during the last 2 miles of my run. Guess what was waiting for me in my driveway when I got home! SCORE!
