Phoenix Marathon

It's over. In some ways I'm relieved it's over, but mostly I'm slightly embarrassed at how poorly I paced it and how slowly I ended up running the last, oh 10 miles. Part of me wishes I hadn't even done it, and conveniently, my chip never recorded a finish time, and there are exactly zero pictures of me doing the race. So maybe it was all a bad dream! Oh wait, here's a video from someone else's finish. Yup, that's me. Evidence.

The pictures that came up on my page were all the generic ones, but includes the great sunrise that morning.

So on to the race. I switched my corral and found the 3:20 pacer. He was a short stocky balding little man with quite a following. The first five miles were almost perfectly on pace, and I was praising little bald man in my head. Then slowly and steady, despite the more steep uphill climb (ok, it still wasn't steep), the pace went lower and lower. I was hitting several sub-7:30s-- through 11 miles, when I finally decided to back off. The goal was 7:38 pace, and I knew that was even pushing it given my complete lack of race pace training. I spent the next few miles, through 16, slowing down steadily, and then hit the dreaded 8+ mile. One single mile after that one was sub 8 mins, even though the course was all downhill from that point on. So was my race. This says it all.

My hamstrings started cramping with more effort than they'd given up until that point, and I paused to turn on the ipod for some entertainment. I have to say I heard some decent songs and bands through about 18 miles on the Rock N Roll course, but after plugging the ipod in, they just annoyed me. Actually everything became more irritating-- the sticky cytomax coating on my hands, the rough road and its cracks that twisted my ankles, the way people kept passing me, my stupid garmin that kept showing these slow miles. Maybe I was really going much faster, and it was one of those garmin glitches. Like how it crashes after 100 laps when the language is set to Danish (for real). But it wasn't. 

I even had a mile in the 9s if you count the stop to attempt to stretch the hamstrings. I could've killed the woman on the bullhorn at 25.2 miles who kept saying, "Only one more mile!" That was too long for me. And then, many turns later, I crossed that finish line, one minute slower than my first and only flat out marathon 10 years ago, and only 2 minutes faster than my best IM marathon. Awesome. 

I've never felt muscle pain quite like what came over me just beyond the finish line. I sat and waited for Jeremy (PR!), grimacing in pain to the point that people were asking me if I was ok. Not sure what that was all about, but when Jeremy finally got there, the benefit of having a doctor for a husband became clear: he carried an extra pain pill in his pocket and gave it to me.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel hot tub and lounging by the pool, then eating pizza and enormous cookie dough desserts. I contemplated either a) never running again, or b) going for a do over. I'm still holding out on the decision. 

We're ready for a change of sport, at least for the weekend, and heading up to the mountain for a little snow skiing. Cross  your fingers for our knees and other breakable parts.