Notes
The marathon went really well this weekend. I woke up around 5:00 am to get ready for it (start time: 7:30), ate some whole wheat pita bread, a banana nut multi-grain muffin, two bananas, some omega-3 natural peanut butter, and some coffee, along with about 1.5 liters of water. My girlfriend and my friend Josh drove over to a parking lot near the starting line and walked over after breakfast. I warmed up by jogging an easy mile on a golf course, and then I got on the starting line.
The race started out a little bit faster than I expected. My goal time for the entire race was 2:40, so I planned on going out in 1:20 for the first half. However, some of my close friends were running and I realized that running with people would be a lot more enjoyable than running solo the entire time. Furthermore, the wind was very ferocious throughout the entire race, so I couldn't afford to not have people to work with. Anyways, a strong wind at our backs coupled with being nervous led the first mile to be a 5:40.
We eventually settled back down and kept running between 5:55 and 6:05 mile pace for the next 20 miles or so (I went through the half marathon in 1:18). I was running with my friend Bert, my friend Jon, and some Ethiopian guy named Sunya-somethingorother. I talked to him a little bit during the race but I couldn't understand anything he said. The wind was terrible from mile 6 to mile 19, so we had to draft off one another and trade leads quite a bit, but it worked out well.
At mile 21, I found out what "hitting the wall" really was. I was still able to run a 6:00 mile on that mile, but it was painful. I knew that the pace I was running was great, so I knew as long as I got to the finish line everything would be great. I was somehow able to finish those last few miles (my last one was pretty slow, 6:39, compared to the rest of my race, but not as bad as some people I passed who were really crawling at that point) and I ended up getting 7th place and running 2:39:11 which beat my goal time. Thus, I was very happy. Results can be found at www.shamrockmarathon.com.