National Marathon

I slept alright last night.  The brief warm up jog outside of the armory felt fine, and I had a singular focus of sticking to goal plan: 5:50 pace.

An overall lack of mile markers made it very hard to get the pace dialed in correctly.  I found myself at 10 miles in 57:27, and this was the first identifiable mile marker since 5 (29:18).  The group of miles between 5 and 10 was hardly flat, and I found myself realizing that I had deviated from the plan for a fifth of the race. I immediately let the group of guys who were throwing in surges go, and tried to bring everything under control.

Too little, too late. My IT band on the right side tightened up around 9 miles, and strangely didn't get much worse for the remainder of the race, but didn't get any better either.  Half split was 1:15.15. I made it through 20 in 1:55.45, and then slowed over the final 10k to 2:35.55.

It is a 25 second PR, and I am lucky to have been given that based on how off everything felt starting around 10.  With a few miles to go, I was wondering if I would have another massive blow up like I had in the fall of 2007 when I closed out the last 1.2 in nearly 12 minutes.  Somehow I managed to keep my head in the game, enough to do what I could.  The last few miles were probably just under 7:00 pace.

My calves got busted up, my adductor on the side I had surgery on was annoyed, overall it was not the best of races.  The most frustrating part to deal with at the moment is how poorly my body responded in the final 10k (one could make the argument that things were helter skelter prior to that point).

My initial plan for this season was to do this race, barely pr without breaking the bank, and then gear up for the Wisconsin marathon in May.  As my fitness progressed, and I had some awesome longer marathon+ pace runs, I decided to give my effort at National the full blast.  Given that this clearly did not go how I wanted it to, now what I have to figure out to do is to get my body under control as quickly as possible, and then put in 3 more weeks of solid training.  I can at least rest well knowing that I will have had a marathon pace run of the full distance in the build up.

Now it's time for me to figure out how to accomplish something I've never tried to attempt before.