Notes
2:37:08 @ the Houston Marathon. Got stuck in traffic the first couple hundred meters, but it held me back well and I was able to get going soon enough. Hit the 5k in 18:02 and was able to pick it up from there especially once we started going south on kirby. 10k in 35:45 and felt brilliant. Still felt good turning east and had a nice group before the half marathon split off. Discussed goal times with a guy around mile 8 and I wanted to go slighly faster so I broke off on my own. Things went south real quickly from there. Hit my first real rough patch right before 10 miles, but I was able to come out of it ok with pace only slowed slightly. Once we got to 11 miles the legs had locked a bit and I knew I was in for a day. Hill right before the half hurt pretty bad, but I was still muscling around 550ish until then. First major slowdown was on post oak into the wind and it was all suffering from there, but was able to keep running around 6ish until 18. After that I slowed to around 6:10s, felt like I was crawlling and it took major effort. Really tried to reset myself in memorial park and enjoy the music and crowds but the pace would not speed up. Once we hit the city again and small inclines on the underpasses I was completely toasted and slowed to 6:20-30 . Pulled it back the last 1.2 and got just about everything I could have gotten out of myself the last 1200.
Overall: Felt good to start and started to go very south around mile 12 or so, but was able to keep running around 6ish until 18 and a reasonable pace until ~5k to go. Pretty bad positive split like 1:15:52 and then 1:21:24, but such is life.
I think my training cycle was just not quite consistent enough for that 2:31-32 range but we’ll get there. Probably could have gotten in the 2:34 range if I'd been more realistic from the start and hadn't gone out quite as fast. Only took down ~1.5 gels and a tiny bit of Gatorade cause my stomach felt terrible, but honestly i don’t really think that mattered. Really was trying to pick it up a couple of times in the last 10k but kept getting slower, this really was all i had. Kept getting gunned down by women going for the otq who were running much smarter marathons than me as well, pretty cool but rather demoralizing lmao
TL;DR The marathon is extremely hard