MARINE CORPS MARATHON (race report):

The MCM course is tricky. It's hilly (up and down) for about the first 9.5 miles and then almost totally flat until the very end, where there's a rude little finishing hill. The obvious strategy for running such a course is to conserve energy during the early hills, then pick up your pace for miles 10-20 and hold on as best you can for the final 10k, the beginning of which is marked by a long bridge over the Potomac known to me most unaffectionately as The Bridge of Horror. But I have never succeeded at deploying this strategy successfully in my now three attempts, because the hills at the beginning take too much out of me and prevent me from establishing a rhythm. Perhaps one simply must run a more significant negative split on this course than I have attempted? This time I aimed to run an even or only slightly negative split and to finish in under 3 hours. I went through the half in 1:30:14 pretty much on track. Up to that point the weather had not been a factor. It was cloudy, about 60 degrees, and windy from the approach of hurricane Sandy, which didn't really set in on the area for another 24 hours or so. But just after halfway, we rounded a bend and were hit with a steady 15-20 mph headwind. We ran straight into the wind for about 2.5 miles, then were blown around by crosswinds for about 3 miles as we circled the exposed National Mall. Mercifully, the wind wasn't too bad on The Bridge of Horror, but shortly afterwards we turned straight into the wind again for the final 3 miles. The windy second half made the course considerably slower than it otherwise would have been for everyone running this year. But the wind turned out not to be my biggest problem. Shortly after halfway, literally within a minute of rounding that bend and hitting the headwind for the first time, I had a sudden and sharp GI pain after eating a gel (my second of the race) and drinking some water. The pain was low down on my left side and was bad enough that I immediately slowed way down and struggled to continue running at all. It's difficult to tell with hindsight how long it lasted. It was probably a sharp pain for 1-2 minutes and then weakened to a duller pain for about the time it took me to run a mile or so. It was gone after less than 10 minutes, but by then I was broken. Over the next few miles, I tried initially to speed up again, then realized that was impossible to sustain, and finally resigned myself to gritting out the rest of the race at a much slower pace. At least I never walked, but I did stop briefly at a water stop the next time I ate a gel in order to make sure that everything went down ok (it did). After averaging 6:53/mi. over the first half, I ran the second half at an average 7:47/mi., finishing in 3:12:17. Here are my 5k splits:


5k 21:39 = 6:58 pace
10k 42:38 (20:59) = 6:45 pace
15k 1:04:04 (21:26) = 6:54 pace
20k 1:25:33 (21:29) = 6:55 pace
25k 1:48:04 (22:31) = 7:15 pace
30k 2:12:09 (24:05) = 7:45 pace
35k 2:35:57 (23:48) = 7:40 pace
40k 3:01:02 (25:05) = 8:04 pace

So this was a disappointing race for me. I was slowed down by two factors outside my control on race day: GI trouble and wind. I suspect that the GI problem may have been caused by something I ate in the day or two before the race, given how low it was - perhaps too many vegetables? In any case, because of those two factors, the race became more a test of grit than of my marathon training and fitness, and it's impossible to know how close I might have come to my goal had the stars aligned differently. But that's the marathon, isn't it? Not having run one in a year, I had forgotten how much sheer grit is involved in the second half. Oddly, that may be what makes me keep coming back to the marathon: that it's so complex and unpredictable. It has almost as much in common with mountain climbing as with running a 10k. I'm not sure that I can wait another year before doing one again.