The PlanI realized that I had a huge gap in posts and didn't quite explain the leap from possibly going to the
St. Jude Memphis Marathon to the
Tucson Marathon.
Before Thanksgiving, I was checking my travel for the following week and realized that I wasn't going to get back into Houston the night of Friday, November 30. There would be no way, then, that I could do Memphis. I was pretty determined to run something this weekend.
I had no interest in Las Vegas (which was on Sunday) so Tucson came into view. I could get to the Expo in time on reward travel with Continental (through Phoenix) as well as a room on Marriott Rewards points in Tucson. The question became: Could I get a late checkout?
I called the Marriott Courtyard at Williams Circle in Tucson, spoke to Amber, the manager, and she said she could do as late as 3 p.m. Then it was game on! Tucson it would be.
Getting ThereEven after going to dinner late with Waverly on Friday night (Red Robin in Shenandoah), I was able to get all of my clothes washed for this week's business trip. I got to bed by about 1 a.m. and was up around 7:30 a.m. before I had to leave the house at 10 a.m. to head to the airport.
I recapped the remainder in an earlier post.Packet Pickup / ExpoIt was OK. I was able to get my bib number, timing chip and bag in less than five (5) minutes and the area that contained it and the Expo was no bigger - at the Hilton Resort - than a space needed for a wedding that had a large post-ceremony dinner.
Pre-Race LogisticsSince it was a point-to-point, buses would take runners to the start. (This marathon should really be called the Greater Tucson Area Marathon because you never run in Tucson at all.) The night before, I figured out the logistics to get to where runners would board the bus.
I left the hotel at 4:50 a.m., stopped at a Shell station to get a little food in my stomach as well as something else to drink, and by 5:20 a.m., I was queueing up in a very long string of red lights in the Arizona darkness. It was a sight that was reminiscent when Waverly and I pulled onto the grounds of where the Buffalo Springs Lake Half Ironman was held in Lubbock. (There we saw triathletes getting out of the cars that they were riding in and running down this large hill - that they would later bike up - to get to the starting area.)
I began to have the same fears. I thought to myself, "They said not to wait until 6 a.m. (when the last buses would leave) and I hadn't." There were no officers at the intersection to direct cars through the traffic lights nor were there adequate volunteers after waiting through 20-plus minutes of traffic to point runners where to park.
Once I got parked and talked to some other runners that said that they change something with the marathon every year, I relaxed once I found out which bus that I needed to be on to go to the marathon start. (There were a couple of half marathoners that got on the bus that I was on and somebody kindly let them know that unless they wanted to do an extra 13.1 that they'd need to get on a different set of buses.) Unfortunately, I wasn't on one of the chartered buses, but the school bus wasn't too terribly cold as I had socks on my hands (working as gloves.)
On the way north, out Highway 77, you could see the slight elevation climb as well as the miles and miles of cones (which prompted me to think that their biggest expense could have been for those alone!) After about 30 minutes or so, we finally got to the start area and got out of the bus. Why? I'm not sure as many of the runners in many of the other buses were wisely staying in theirs keeping warm.
The first person that I saw that I didn't know that was going to be there?
Yong Collins of Houston, but that really didn't surprise me too much. I got a quick hug and moved up towards where the start line was going to be.
I got out to warm-up a little, look for the fellow Houstonians that I knew would be there and placed an early morning call to
Bill Dwyer.
All of a sudden, it felt like "old home week" as I saw
Leno Rios of the
Tornados Running Club, who was soon followed by fellow HARRA Board member
Jennifer Brown and HMSA member
Clark Courtright.
Then I saw good friend
John DiMarco from Sugar Land, who was giving me the latest running club scoop (interesting and unfortunate), which dovetailed into a discussion with this very pretty young lady with a Mayde Creek track sweatshirt on. I didn't recognize her although I've met her before. It was Luis Armenteros' girlfriend
Laerica Huff.
She said she'd have to tell "Lu" I was here and she said that it seemed odd to be at a race and not wonder when she was going to get lapped by him! John and I both had LP Run stories involving Luis. It made for some good laughs!
John asked me what I was shooting for and I told him that I was there for state No. 10 and that I'd be happy to be between 5 hours and 5:15. He said he was shooting between four hours and 4:15 (and that he did a marathon last month in North Carolina.) I didn't realize that he had picked his pace up that much and I was a little surprised, but I'm all for saying, "Go make it happen!"
The RaceIt was nice and cool. I had a long sleeve technical shirt on with my
New York City Marathon race jacket (which brought a litany of questions from people) over top of it. I had brought my black Team Timex hat that
Kim Hager handed out at the last TWRC meeting with me on the trip, but didn't bring it with me. (Given the sunburn that I have, perhaps I should have!)
Mile 1/2 --
20:29.42The first mile was definitely downhill and even though I missed the road mile marker, I saw the painted "1" on the road and hit my watch. However, it didn't capture the 9:44 first mile. And just about the time I hit the button, we encountered -- what's this? -- an uphill. (Hmmm ... this was advertised as a downhill course.)
In the meantime, I met a runner -
Marcie Foster - that was from Kingman, Arizona and we were talking about the City of Trees Marathon in Boise that I did last November.
Mile 3 -- 10:59.75 (31:29.17)Mile 4 -- 11:33.07 (43:02.24)Mile 5 -- 11:06.03 (54:08.27)Mile 6 -- 10:33.70 (1:04:41.97)Mile 7 -- 10:56.93 (1:15:38.90)Mile 8 -- 10:32.06 (1:26:10.96)Water stops alternated at every other mile. I took water at 2 and Comp-1 at mile 4. (I had never heard of the brand before, but it wasn't that bad. It sort of tasted like Gatorade.) At the mile 6 station, I took my first Power Gel. The plan was to take one every hour.
We got out of the uphills by the end of mile 4, and then I was able to get into a little bit of a rhythm. Mile 7's time would have been to include the mile 6 water stop.
Mile 9 -- 10:54.52 (1:37:05.48)Mile 10 -- 10:56.26 (1:48:01.74)At this point, we were going to be making a diversion off of the highway. Up until about mile 6, we had been basically on some back roads that you might find in a rural central Texas subdivision out of town. (Actually it reminded me a bit of the courses at the
Helotes Half Marathon in San Antonio and the
Country Roads 10K in San Marcos.) So from mile 6 to mile 10, we were out on a major state highway where there were three lanes -- one for cars going each way and another for runners.
As soon as I hit a water stop, passed the mile 10 marker and saw a timing mat on the other side of the road, I thought to myself that we had a 3.1-mile out-and-back. (It was really at 13.7 miles.)
I had to stop briefly to get a small rock out of my left shoe, and then I looked up to see that this out-and-back was going to be anything but flat and downhill.
Mile 11 -- 12:17.31 (2:00:19.05)Mile 12 -- 12:47.01 (2:13:06.06)I saw the out-and-back on the map, but the elevation part of it reveals nothing but all downhill. When you went through a waterstop and crossed a "make sure you were there" timing mat (like in trail running ... well the checkpoint not the timing mat) and before you passed the mile 12 marker, you were at the front gates for the
Biosphere project of the early 1990s.
On the way out, I saw Yong, Laerica, Clark and then
Paul Cooley (who was proudly wearing his Houston Masters singlet). Not too far back was John DiMarco.
It was also where my 11-minute per mile pace took a little bit of a hit. I also took my second Power Gel right around the mile 12 marker.
Mile 13 -- 11:31.63 (2:24:37.69)Mile 14 -- 11:54.08 (2:36:31.77)With the timing mat at 13.7, we didn't get to the mile 14 point until after the water stop that was right at the highway. This was the start of a visibly notable long stretch of slight downhill. The last two miles weren't as bad as it was going out, but I was also now in the 12-minute per mile pace (which would yield a 5:12 target time). I hadn't completely given up hope on the 11-minute per mile of 4:48, but it would fade soon.
Mile 15 -- 11:35.15 (2:48:06.92)Mile 16 -- 12:07.02 (3:00:13.94)I was pretty pleased with myself through this point, but I knew that the lack of miles would catch up with me soon. I was OK with this fact, but you get a chance to see what you're made of. I hadn't come in with a thought that I would be able to run the entire way (especially with the unknown pounding that the downhill would take -- even though it was still just 26.2 miles).
Mile 17 -- 11:56.98 (3:12:10.92)Mile 18 -- 12:36.63 (3:24:47.55)Things were still OK here, but I started to get into a little bit of run/walk and I had pulled the zipper down on my jacket as the sun started to warm things up a little bit. I knew though that things would start to change soon as I was physically just pounded from not having as many road miles as I should have.
Mile 19 -- 13:05.17 (3:37:52.72)I ran to the mile marker to try and keep the split under 13 minutes, but to no avail.
I was also doing the 5:12 finish calculations -- 19 miles times 12 minutes is 228, which is 3:48, and I'm 9 minutes under that. As each mile below would appear, I realized that I would lose 5 minutes in two miles against that 9-minute cushion.
Mile 20 -- 14:25.93 (3:52:18.65)Mile 21 -- 14:40.12 (4:06:58.77)Mile 22 -- 14:54.59 (4:21:53.36)Mile 23 -- 15:43.79 (4:37:37.15)Mile 24 -- 14:54.25 (4:52:31.40)This was all just simply as fast as I could power walk. It is at this point that you want to give the volunteers at the water stops - who were absolutely wonderful - a lesson on what not to say! :)
You can see in the change of colors that I gave up the 5:12 finish time in miles 23 and 24.
Mile 25 -- 14:16.78 (5:06:48.18)I ran about .3 of a mile in this mile, but this also included a water stop at 24.5 that I probably should of just bypassed (because my stomach really couldn't handle much of fluids.)
I even ran a little bit to the marker, but by the time I got there, my day was done. Completely.
Mile 26 -- 16:20.73 (5:23:08.91)Last .2 -- 2:52.05 (5:26:00.96)Soon after crossing the finish line, I saw a woman with a
Sunmart jacket on and I said, "I'm sure that you're not crazy enough to do Sunmart on Saturday after this!" It was
Karen Boman with
Katy Fit and with her was
Dennis Shaw (also with KF). He said that it was the most difficult marathon of his 15 finishes.
The official chip time was
5:26:07, which I'm good with because the first mile may have been off my that much as I juggled to get the button pressed.
Post-Race AnalysisIt is Monday evening here in Pasadena and I'm just beat. Walking is more difficult than it has ever been the day after a marathon. I've pretty much have ruled Sunmart out, especially with the increasing temperatures as the weekend approaches.
Looking back, there is no way that I could have slowed it down and abated the walking at all. The thing is that you're still pounding the ground with each step that you take.
The bottom line is that I did this in an unstructured manner; therefore, I'm not terribly disappointed at the result. I am in the sense that I know that I've done better. (Heck, I ran 49:03 at Run Thru The Woods for 5 miles ... and didn't feel like it.) However, given everything, I know where I stand now.
I also know the difference between me and a 4:30-4:45 marathon is about 25-30 pounds and more miles. Am I ready to do what it takes to get there? Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer is there, isn't it?
We'll see. I just want to enjoy what I'm doing. When I am, then I'll be more motivated to get there. More later ... and thanks for reading! :)
