On the day before the Super Bowl, Docket Rocket and I were wandering through the Expo at the Surf City Marathon and Half in my hometown of Huntington Beach, California.  I saw the Santa Rosa Marathon’s booth.  They featured a big spinney finisher’s medal, a jacket, and a bottle of wine for everyone who ran their marathon in late August.  After being assured that the Russian River Valley (north of San Francisco) had good weather for a marathon in August.  I signed up.  For signing up at the expo, the race organizer gave me a free bottle of wine.

My marathon personal best time is 4:55.  I set it at Walt Disney World in January, which was a race I didn’t really train for or care about.  In looking to set a goal time for Santa Rosa, I typed my 5k and half marathon personal best time into McMillan’s pace calculator.  McMillan’s calculator says that an equivalent marathon time is 4:09 or a 9:20 mm pace.  In 1994 Oprah Winfrey crossed the finish line of the Marine Corps Marathon in 4:29:20. McMillan’s 4:09 seems impossibly fast, so Oprah seems like the better goal.  I spent the next 18 weeks diligently training to run a marathon at Oprah’s  10:15 minute mile pace.

As I was packing my bags into the car for the 9 hour drive north to Santa Rosa, I pulled out my Garmin watch and set the virtual pacer to 10:15 mm or Oprah’s pace.  While running the race, the watch would do the math and tell me where I was relative to Oprah in 1994.

The Expo & Course

DeLoach Winery is the main sponsor the Santa Rosa Marathon, and hosts the expo.  Their facility was designed to host no more than hundred people looking to taste their wines, not a couple of thousand people looking for a marathon or half bib.  Traffic getting into and parking at the Expo was awful.  Since I’d spent 11 hours in the car getting to the expo from my house (I love Bay area traffic!), my nerves were pretty shot by the time I got there.

The course consists of a quick tour of the City of Santa Rosa, the out of town on the Santa Rosa Creek Trail.  At Mile 8, the course makes a giant circle of the vineyards and farms to the west of Santa Rosa.  At Mile 20, the course heads back into town via the Santa Rosa Creek Trail to the finish line at Julliard Park.

Start to Mile 5

After parking the car in the parking structure of the Santa Rosa Mall, and eating my traditional pre-race breakfast of a Pop-tart and Gatorade, my wife and I wander over to Julliard Park and the starting line.  The weather was perfect.  The air temperature was in the mid 50s.  The sun was obscured by an overcast cloud layer forecast to burn off well after I crossed the finish line.  With roughly 1500 marathon entrants, this is the smallest marathon I’ve ever run.

The horn sounded promptly at 6:00 am and off I went into the pre-dawn darkness.  I couldn’t really tell how fast I was running.  I ran with the flow.  At the first mile marker, I felt the happy buzz of my watch.  I was ahead of Oprah.

At the first water stop, I took a cup of water and Gatorade.  I took a sip of the Gatorade and spit it back out.  The Gatorade was made from a powder, and the folks who mixed it didn’t use enough water. Yuck.

At mile 3 and as the sun was starting to rise, I descended onto the Santa Rosa Creek Trail for the six mile run out of town.  The Santa Rosa Creek trail is a bike path that follows the creek.  The creek is lined in shrubs and trees.  The one thing that is noticeably absent from the Santa Rosa Creek is water.  As California suffers through its fourth year of record drought, the creek is dry.  The ten foot cinder block walls of the adjacent housing developments give the trail a canyon-like feeling.

While running outbound, I listen to the conversations going on around me.  My fellow runners are a chatty bunch.  This is a local race and the conversation focuses on the northern California running scene.  I’m wondering how chatty they will be on the way back in.

Mile 1 – 9:43

Mile 2 – 9:44

Mile 3 – 9:36

Mile 4 – 9:58

Mile 5- 9:36

Miles 6  to 10   

Six miles out, I run into the 4:13 pace group.  This mob of people blocks the entire path.  Although some of my fellow runners are annoyed by this, I’m not fazed.  I’m well ahead of Oprah.  I’m running close to McMillan’s prediction.  Maybe McMillan is right.  Maybe I can run a 4:09 marathon.

At mile 8 I leave the creek trail and hit the country roads of rural Sonoma County.  Mile 10 runs through the DeLoach Winery, the same place that hosted the Expo.  As I run up the road to the winery I comment to the runner next to me that I think we’re moving on this road faster today on foot than yesterday in my car.

Mile 6 – 9:31

Mile 7 – 9:27

Mile 8 – 9:52

Mile 9 – 10:14

Mile 10 – 9:57

Mile 11 to 15

The course now makes a big circle through the farms and vineyards between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol.  I’m the kinda guy that likes to know where he is on the map.  The course now makes three right hand turns and then a left turn and returns to the creek trail.  It’s beautiful out here.  It’s mostly shaded, and mostly flat.  The only real complaint is the jarring bovine smell emanating from the dairy farms and the unpalatably strong Gatorade.  I looked at my watch and see that my pace has fallen, and that I’m actually running fifteen seconds slower than Oprah.  I’m not worried.  I’d banked all that time going out.  I tell myself I’ll be fine.

The quality of the Gatorade does not improve. I now understand why some people wear a fuel belt and carry their own fluids.  At the mile 15 water stop I try adding the water from the water cup to the Gatorade.  That makes it somewhat drinkable.

Mile 11 – 10:06

Mile 12 – 10:05

Mile 13 – 10:32

Mile 14 – 10:21

Mile 15 – 10:01

Mile 16 to 20

In the middle of mile 16, I start to feel minor gastrointestinal cramping.  I’d experienced this in training and other marathons.  I tell myself, “It’s just my GI tract telling me what I think about the fact that I’ve been running for three hours.”  I’m also starting to fee fatigued and a bit disoriented.  At the mile 20 sign, I’m handed a banana.  As slow to a walk to unpeel and eat it, my watch buzzes.  Oprah just passed me.

Mile 16 – 11:08

Mile 17 – 10:27

Mile 18 – 10:55

Mile 19 – 11:09

Mile 20 – 12:39

Mile 21 to the Finish

I finish the banana and start running down the Santa Rosa Creek trail back towards town.  I tell myself that because of the twenty five minute spread between Oprah and my PR, I’m still going to set a PR here.  But running is hard.  I’m so tired. I tell myself that I’m a machine and machines don’t tire.  They just keep running until they fail.  I smile, give a thumbs up and a word of encouragement to the morbidly obese and amputee half marathon walkers I pass on the trail. They’ve got this, and I’ve got this.

It started as a niggling cramp in my right ankle.  I didn’t pay much mind to it.  Most of my body was in pain.  Passing the mile 24 marker, this niggling cramp exploded into a full leg cramp.  The sole of my foot to the knee felt like it was on fire.  I came to a complete stop and doubled over in pain.  I was done.  A personal record no longer mattered.  Finishing no longer mattered. If there had been a race official nearby, I would have instructed them to summon the medics and get me off the course.  But there wasn’t.  There was nobody out here.

After what I think was the longest minute of my life, I realized that the only way I was going to get out of the cavern-like creek trail was under my own power. I untied my right shoe to relieve the pressure I felt on the foot and started walking.

Five hours and twelve minutes after starting, I walked across the finish line.

Mile 21 – 11:51

Mile 22 – 12:35

Mile 23 – 14:17

Mile 24 – 16:57

Mile 25 – 23:29

Mile 26 – 21:00

The last .2  - 17:03 mm pace

The After Party

I collected my finisher’s medal, slapped a cheesy grin on my face and had my picture taken with the medal, guzzled a bottle of water and parked myself on a bench to wait for my wife.  My wife arrived with the traditional post-race bottle of Coke.  As I sat on the park bench drinking the coke, one of the Race Guard Medics approached me.  “Are you ok?”  he asked.  I said yes.  The medic, said, “You don’t look so good.  Would you like to go to the Medical Tent?”  I didn’t really want to go, but my wife thought this was an excellent idea.

In the tent, I told the doctor about the cramping.  She took my blood pressure and asked me what my normal blood pressure was.  120/80 I replied.  The doc said mine was a lot lower than that (74/40).  They asked if they could do an EKG on me.  I said sure.  They took my finisher’s medal off me, wired me up and read the strip.  The doc said that my heart looked normal for a guy who just ran a marathon.  They diagnosed me as badly dehydrated.  They plied me with orange juice and pretzels, and jabbed an IV in my arm.  The IV really hurt, but it didn’t really faze me.  It’s just one more part of my body in pain.

Twenty minutes and a bag of saline later, my blood pressure read a normal 120/80.  Just to be sure I was ok, the doc asked me to stand up.  They took my blood pressure again.  When it read as normal, the medical staff unhooked me from all the machinery, put the medal back around my neck and booted me out of the med tent. I returned to my hotel room, took a shower, and found that they missed three chest leads.

So, what did I learn at the Santa Rosa Marathon?

1. Drink the damn Gatorade;
2. Oprah is pretty fast;
3. Drink the damn Gatorade;
4. If you’re going to drive 500 miles the day before running a marathon, get yourself some astronaut underwear;
5. Drink the damn Gatorade;
6. McMillan’s math is fuzzy; and
7. It doesn’t matter how bad it tastes, drink the damn Gatorade.

I’ll be back out there, chasing Oprah on Valentine’s day through the streets of Los Angeles.

Finally, please note, I’ve purchased several photos from the race photographers, including a “house of pain” photo that I’m sure is destined to be an instant RA classic.  I’ll insert them as soon as I get them.

Sorry you had a tough time (and I was flinching when I saw your starting splits since those tell me it wouldn't end well), but you finished, you learned from it.  That's what's important!!

Lurch,

Great report - and great job in staying the course.

I suspect that most who have run the distance have experienced the final few miles like you - I know I have on more than one occasion.

And I see that you've also experienced the wonders of a post race IV (or two).  If only we could find a way to run with an IV connected.

Best wishes for LA.

Glad you are ok, sounds like a rough end to the race. I used a Camelbak in 2 of my halfs, it can be really nice because you drink when you want & it provides a little cooling until all the ice melts.

The long car ride can't exactly help either. Better conditions & less car time should help you in your quest to catch Oprah.

Glad you are okay.  Bet you could beat Oprah if she ran today.

Yikes, that was a scary ending.  I'm glad the medical tent folks took good care of you.  Good report; now go get 'em in February!

there are studies showing that it's just as effective if you swish and spit instead of swallowing it.

Allow me to doubt that. Not that you've seen studies, I believe you, but that it is as effective... Not!

It does send signal that yumminess is coming, and that does give you a little mental stimulus, but this can not help hydrate you. So in the long run, it can not be as effective.

This is just my opinion, based on my own analysis. And I know I'm always right, until proven wrong 

Ouch.  Looks like a pretty tough race. Whatever made you go out so fast?  Just felt easy and you got carried away?

Congrats on toughing it out - that last 10k sounded like it was pretty painful.