Congratulations to Jenn for finishing with a 4:54:27, which beats her marathon PR by something like eight hundred minutes!
Month: October 2008
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Nike Women's Marathon Recap
First off, I had to get this thing off my chest before writing my race summary. Now that I have, I can give you the down and dirty.
One: I finished! Goal accomplished. My official time was 4:57:48 and you can see all the results here.
Two: I came in within my projected time zone (between 4:30 and 5:00) so that is another success!
Three: This was the worst race of my life (physically).
Jenn and I had mapped out our race strategy fairly well. The course starts with a gentle downhill followed by a flat portion which continues to the 10k mark where the real hills begin. Fortunately the “real hills” on this course aren’t that bad, at least not from our perspective. Training in Atlanta involves lots of hill climbs. Our strategy was to stick together, going slow until the hills picked up and then I expected that we would diverge as I’m a better hill climber than Jenn is.
10k mark passed, check. Hills done, check. Everything seems to be in order when sneakily, around mile nine or ten, things seem to not so much be in order anymore. I start to have more pain in the hips and thighs as I run. My walk breaks start to hurt(!?). I start to take more than 60 second walk breaks every five minutes. My pace slows from my projected 10:30 per mile to 11:00 and slower and things really start to hurt.
I was in dire straits from mile 18 onward and it was only the fact that I was not going to drop out of this god-damned marathon (yes, that’s what I was using as a mantra) that kept me going. I had thoughts that if things got worse I would be unable to complete the race. My muscles would just give in.
I wasn’t entirely at the end of my rope. At mile 22 or so I started doing the math to see if I was going to break the five-hour mark. I figured that I was on target but that it was going to be really really really close so I tried picking it up just a bit. Then at Mile 25 during my walk break I had numb fingers and toes and I was staggering around like a drunkard carrying an anvil so I slowed down a bit. Mile 26 and I had nothing left for the final leg to the finish, just get there and get done.
I received a winners necklace (in a Tiffany’s box) from a man in a tuxedo, but I can’t remember what he looked like. I was staggering at this point and had to go lie down. Which hurt as much as standing up (not fair!). As a complicating factor, the temperature was about 65 and the wind was blowing in off the ocean which meant as soon as I stopped running, the race to hypothermia began. I told Jenn that I was wrecked and that we had to get to the buses for our clothes, and then get the hell back to the hotel.
Impressions: The race was well-organized. There were plenty of water stops and support for the runners. Each mile was marked clearly with time boards so I got all my mile splits. The race results are fancy and cool. The Expo was bit boring, but they were space-constrained (in the middle of Union Square) and my desires for race expos are for more vendors and less fun stuff. I was impressed with the way they handled the bag drop, although they should explain the details of the system in the race instructions. It’s not that complicated but it gets VERY complicated if you’re trying to figure it out before lining up. I’m not sure why I had so much difficulty with this race because while I hadn’t trained as well as I wanted to, I had trained sufficiently to avoid a near breakdown like I had.
My final impression: I’ll never run this race again and I’ll discourage anyone else from doing it, too.
I won’t belabor the point that I made in this email. You can go read it there. However, Team in Training I think needs to take into account the effect that they had on me. I’m a practical, phlegmatic kind of person, but when I find myself looking at Team in Training t-shirts in the airport on the day after the race and having strong negative feelings, there’s a problem.
Jenn beat me by 3 and a half minutes, by the way. She caught up to me at a walk break around mile 24. She asked if I was ok (I wasn’t) and I told her to just run her own race. At the end of the walk break she took off at the speed of fast, and that just wasn’t fair. Love ya, honey!
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Letter to SF Chronicle
This went to C.W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle in response to this story. An oblique response, really.
Good day,
I didn’t really feel like commenting on the story, because however I wrote this, it would come across as whiny. However, you might find some story fodder here:
The Nike Women’s Marathon was my first. My wife came with me, and this was her second marathon. I was looking forward to this race and had trained adequately, if not completely. My goal was to finish the race and I had no reason to suspect any vast difficulty to run this course. I’m an experienced runner and I train in hilly terrain.
Unfortunately, my race turned into a slog from mile nine on. I had to push and push in order to keep myself going. It was a trial which doesn’t bear much desciption. Suffice to say that this was my worst race ever, in terms of physical performance.
That, however, wasn’t the problem.
Again, the Nike Women’s Marathon was my first, and I picked it because of its location (yay San Francisco!) and because I thought it would be fun to run with a bunch of women. My wife laughed at me for that, but I didn’t really care. What I didn’t anticipate was that because the Nike Women’s Marathon was a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society, it was really the “Nike Team in Training Marathon”. This resulted in what felt like half of the field being TNT participants. The course was filled with TNT Coaches and people there to exclusively cheer on TNT participants. For those of us who were having such difficult times it was very disheartening to have dozens of people cheering for TNT runners and only the (very!) occasional one for me.
I’m an experienced racer, although obviously not a marathoner, and this is the first time I’ve felt rejected by a race. Because of this overwhelming bias toward Team in Training participants, I will actively discourage people I know from running in this race unless they are working with TNT.
A point in your story was that you “are hoping … that [runners] leave town talking about the terrific location, the great restaurants and the perfectly organized event.” The event was well organized, and the City was great, but the race was disappointing to me. I won’t be coming back for the race.
I may be only one person (and a man in a women’s marathon at that) but races should be all-inclusive and welcoming. The ones that are not…well the word will get around.
Sincerely,
Bill Ruhsam
Marietta, GA——-
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Nike Women's Marathon
We’re off today to go to San Francisco for the 2008 Nike Women’s Marathon.Neither of us are truly “ready” for this race, but we’ll finish, even if our times aren’t what we’d like them to be. It’s a hilly course (duh, it’s San Francisco) but not terribly so. Especially not for people who train around Atlanta. While our hills may not be as tall as SF’s, there’s plenty of them. Funny enough, I’m not worried about the steep up hill portions of the route so much as the steep down hill descents that are on the other sides of them. Downhills can trash your quads, and the first one of those is at mile 10. Careful will be my watchword
This race is a dry run, of sorts, for my intention to do a full Ironman-distance triathlon next year. I had said to myself last year that if I could train for and complete a marathon without any major issues, then I wouldn’t have any physical problems with training for and completing and ironman. Other than a couple fluke things which I’ve talked about before, I didn’t hit any major stumbling blocks, so it looks like the Ironman is on. Early November 2009, in Panama City Beach, Florida, I’ll be swim/bike/running for 13 or so hours.
Crazy is in the eye of the beholder.