Another year and another DesNews Marathon is in the books. I knew going in that 1st place would be a very tall order given that Jon Kotter keeps getting faster and I only had a few weeks for solid training coming off the injury in the spring.
Woke up at 2:25, ate breakfast, drove to the busses at 3:30 and was lying in the grass as usual by 4:30. Unfortunately Jon found me in the grass and was very chatty so I didn't get to rest much :) The race got off right at 5:30 and Jon and I stayed together until the top of Little Mountain. It took enough effort for me to stay with him that long so I had to let him go if I was going to survice. He slowly pulled away and by mile 20 on Foothill Blvd he was about 2 minutes ahead. I wasn't falling apart but I could definitely sense that a death march was slowly ensuing. I made up the hill on Foothill in OK shape then started down 5th South until I abruptly had to come to a complete stop because the TRAX train was coming and the gate had drop. I waited furiously for about a minute then got going again. Not only did I have to stand still for 1 minute I probably lost more time because my momentum was lost coming down the hill. That was a bummer but it didn't really matter because Jon was long gone and third place was about 20 minutes behind. I managed to hold it together decently over the last few miles and I finished in 2:28 and change. I figure without the TRAX stop and I would have been right under 2:27 which was about 1 minute slower than last year. Not too bad I suppose. Incredibly over the last three years I have run this race my split for the first 15.6 miles have all been within 6 seconds of each other. Unfortunately I don't know my splits for my 2012 race when I ran a course PR of just under 2:22. Now that this race is behind me I plan to run more trails for the next few weeks before getting back on road before STG.
Congrats to Jon for crushing a 2:22+ and to Allie for making her Utah comeback and finishing 2nd.
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