So, how’d I do in my first ever marathon?
Well…I finished. And given the history that my knee had gone to coming into the year, that was an accomplishment in and of itself.
I finished with a time of 5 hours, 43 minutes and 44 seconds. When I had registered for the marathon six months earlier, I had given myself an expected pace of 6 hours. So technically, I had bested my own initial expectations for the run.
But the positives end about there.
I had set such a low goal for my pace because to that point, 3.5 miles was the longest distance I had run, not just that year, but for the last 6 years. I didn’t know how my knee would hold up through such a long distance, and I wanted to give myself a lot of leeway in case I injured something and had to walk a large portion, maybe over half of the race.
But as I went through the 2 months of conditioning my body to run multiple times a week, and after the four months of training, I felt that a more appropriate pace would’ve been between 4 and 4.5 hours. My longest run in training was twenty miles, and I did that in 3 hours and twenty minutes. A marathon is 6.2 miles longer than that, but even accounting for going for a slower pace for this last stretch, I felt I could reasonably have a chance of finishing in under four and a half hours.
Hell, I even felt there was a possibility (I know now having run 2 marathons what a slim chance this actually is) I could actually get a sub four hour pace, with adrenaline giving me a much needed pick me up (I’m seriously laughing at myself as I’m writing this).
From this standpoint, I missed the mark.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t from the limited sleep. I also don’t think it was from standing around for over a half hour just waiting for the race to start and actually being able to cross the starting line.
Somewhere around the 10 or 11 mile mark, my calf started to cramp up. I still ran on it for awhile, forcing myself to make it to at least the half marathon mark before I gave myself a break and tried to walk off the stabbing pain I was feeling in the back of my leg. I gave myself until the 14 mile mark before I started running again, but within a mile and a half I was back to walking.
I couldn’t understand what was going on. The course had some more inclines and declines that I had practiced on, but I was still miles before I had reached the maximum distance I’d ever run in one go. I didn’t get why I was hitting a wall, and why my calf was the body part feeling it. In all my training, I don’t think I’d had an issue with it once.
It wasn’t until after the race was over, when I looked at the readout from my watch that I figured out why my performance wasn’t anywhere close to my training. As I said, the race started at 5 in the morning. I didn’t cross the starting line until much closer to 5:30. Then sun didn’t rise until 7. But even running about 90 minutes in darkness, according to my watch, the average humidity for the entirety of the race was 75%.
These conditions were just nothing close to what I’d been training in, especially for the later weeks, when my longest runs were scheduled. It was unfortunate, but there wasn’t anything I could’ve done to acclimate myself to this prior to the race. For this run, I was just going to have to be content that I was a marathon finisher.
And that I was able to enjoy beautiful Hawaii weather in December.
Which I did.
But it also left me with a lingering desire to prove a could do better.