Notes
First ever marathon up in Marquette Michigan. Beautiful course and basically perfect weather. Really enjoyed it and excited to see what I can do in the future with some more training and now that I have the experience of doing one before. Came through the first half right at 1:27 where Chandler and I had wanted to be and kept rolling down the hill from there for the next 3 miles. around 17 I was really starting to find my groove and feeling good so I started to lead and push the pace a little, around 18 I was still feeling good and had a really good rhythm so dropped it down even more then and split up our group. The next 3 miles felt fantastic and I was cruising really well on pace for a huge negative split and to qualify for New York. Then there was a pretty short steep hill at 21.5 miles that took some of the life out of my legs, but even worse than that was the gradual downhill afterwards that ruined my quads from all of the previous pounding downhill. I was able to keep moving at a reasonable pace, under 7:00 still, but was definitely starting to feel the fatigue/pounding in my legs. At 23 miles I needed a 22:00 5k to qualify for NY and I thought I could definitely still do that and surged for a little bit trying to motivate myself by thinking that the faster I finished the faster I could be done, but a half mile later my quads completely knotted up and were pulling super hard with every step so I ended up stopping to stretch and walked for a while. That started what was probably the hardest 2ish miles I've ever walk/jogged before, and then to finish it all up the last half mile was a slight uphill. I think stopping to walk/stretch the first time was my biggest mistake because that only seemed to make my legs feel worse. Next time I know just to keep pushing through it. Happy with the time though for my first marathon ever and since I hadn't trained nearly as much as I would have liked or had originally planned on