Good luck Perfesser, you can do it!

Finished the Kentucky Derby Festival Marathon with a 4:09:56, trimming a little over 2 minutes off my PR and beating my goal of 4:10.  Great day for racing: temps in the 50's, overcast, little wind, no rain (unlike Nashville which got swamped, apparently).  Ran a pretty well-managed race. Plan was to do the first mile at 10:00, then run 9:30's the rest of the way and actually stuck to that the whole way for the most part  There is a significant climb (150 ft over .75 miles) around mile 12 and I survived that with no problem, felt great at 20 and was starting to pick people off very regularly.  Another climb at mile 22 (100 ft over .75 miles) that almost did me in.  Had to walk the top third (which I'm not ashamed about at all), but my calf/achilles problem finally flared up for real and really had to cut back my effort.  The last 6 miles were 9:18 (flat), 9:38(flat/up), 10:03 (up), 9:59 (up/flat), 9:10 (downhill) and 9:32 (flat).  I'm claiming victory for running my last mile at race average pace plus the only walking I did, other than at water stops, was that little stretch of hill.

I can highly recommend the race:

• The course isn't easy, but it isn't hard either.  Other than the two big climbs (which have corresponding descents) it is essentially flat the whole way.  Most of the time I thought we were running downhill.
• Everything was very well organized: very smooth start, plenty of water stops (although hard to spot at times), plenty of food at the end (which was a complaint from last year)
• Even though it is run in conjunction with a half-marathon, there were plenty of marathoners around me. More than in Nashville or New Orleans for sure.  Also, there is a three mile stretch where we rejoin the marathoners (our mile 18, their 8.5) and they had gates and cones to divide the road so half-marathoners stayed on one side and marathoners on the other so no dodging packs of walkers.
• Louisville turns out to be a great city to visit.  We found plenty of great places to eat, plenty of free or cheap parking.  There wasn't much crowd support, but where is there?

Now, to anxiously await Russ's report.

That was memorable. Beautiful course on a beautiful day. It's rolling hills until a tough 2-mile climb at mile 10, complete with fierce headwind (now I know why this is called Hurricane Point), quad-pounding down to the famous bridge at the halfway point with the pianist playing there. So far so good, but about mile 18 we hit a series of nasty rolling hills that just went on forever, a lot of the road was steeply cambered. That lasted to the finish and I was wiped. It was nice to have a special tent for Boston 2 Big Sur runners. Overall probably the toughest road marathon I've run, right up there with Crater Lake. So I ran about 3:50:30, and I'm very pleased with that on this course.

Nice touch.

Great job, Russ!!  From the photos on the web, the course looks Gorgeous!!