For my first marathon, I had a lot of expectations and theories of what would go on during the race. The madhouse of the startline, the difficultly of sticking to a plan on raceday, or even the adrenaline rush screwing up my pace.
So how did I fare? More after the jump.
Luckily only one of those things happened. The self-seeding startline is one of the most interesting things to watch as people inflate their pace times to sit farther forward in the start. What this causes in reality is a lot of traffic at the start line!
Mile 2 had walkers already, which either means people were ill prepared or bonked on the starting hill in the race. This made getting around people the biggest concern as you were constantly breaking pace to maneuver backwards on occasion to get out of roadblocks.
However, the most awesome part of the marathon was the live music every few miles (which makes me wonder why people listen to ipods if live music is playing??), and they were peppered along south congress and south first through mile 9.
Mile 9 was the start of some of my issues, as my left leg started giving me trouble. I tried using the alternating road camber to alleviate some of it, as well as some nutrition (nuun tablets) to try to see if it was from electrolytes.
Near the split of the marathon/half marathon, things got interesting as it was the start of the 10 mile uphill battle. It was in this section that I passed many people as they started to walk. Keeping my heart rate below 165 became an insane challenge as any pace greater than 11:30/mi spiked my heartrate quickly.
Mile 16+ on the road Great Northern was insanely difficult. As I made the turn off of that road, left leg stopped hurting and my right leg started cramping near the adductor and upper quad. Again, sensing that nutrition might have been at play I started adding more food intake into my routine.
Mile 20 is historically where people hit the wall during a marathon, and in the case of the Austin race it was the start of the downhill after the elevation peak. Unusually, it didn't seem that way as the rolling hills and undulations make pacing and heart rate estimation extremely difficult. I was still fighting 165+ HR's through 23.
And for me, mile 23 was the wall - but not for running. It was a wall for nutrition. Food processing came to a halt, and what was easy for me to process before became nearly a stomachache instead. I had to flush quite a bit of the gels and shot blocks with water, and give them ample time to process. I could also tell by how quickly my heart rate recovered on a downhill on during a walk to the restroom that my glycogen stores were running low.
The last 5k (~3.2 miles) was the most difficult for me, and my data shows it. Regardless of the downhill profile, I was having a hard time keeping my heart rate down and keeping my legs from locking up. The more I stopped the worse the lockup seem to creep in.
As I entered the final climb near the finish, I was able to clear up what stiffness I had an RUN through the finish line - which is something I really wanted to make sure of. Photos of you walking across would seem a bit of a downer, wouldn't it?
And then, finally 26.2 was done. My plan of doing a 5 hour marathon was only off by 5 minutes, and a consistent one at that!
Next will be the season of Tri's leading up to the Austin 70.3, and hopefully in 2014 a full length Ironman!
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