Run fast

Ugh...woke up at 3:15, race at 5:30, dumb friend took me and his brother on a walking tour up, down and around SF (hence the 5 ct miles), flight left at 8:30 PM and just got home at midnight. Not much energy or brain power left so I will have to comment more later. Looking forward to 0 productivity at work tomorrow. Winner was 2:25:32 and 2nd was 6 seconds ahead of me. Doh! 5,036 finishers.

Very small PR but on a considerably harder course. Felt pretty good as splits will show. Not sure about at the 26.59. I definitely wasn't trying to round the corners.

7.6 Mi: 44:47 Pace: 5:54

First Half: 1:17:35 Pace: 5:56

Second Half: 1:16:26 Pace: 5:50 

Finish: 2:34:01 Pace: 5:53

Race Notes:
This race was a lot less painful than the SLC and Ogden Marathons. My stomach didn't have issues and my legs didn't get beaten up as badly. The legs holding up better was probably a combination of the course (up and down) and the fact that I have more races under my belt at this point in the year. I am realizing that despite the terrain I usually end up with about the same time. This either means that I am really good at courses with variable terrain or I am relatively bad at downhill courses like Ogden. Of course it has to be a combo of the two and just shows that to be good at courses around here I need to do something to improve my downhill stamina. The lack of stomach issues must have had something to do with my breakfast (chocoloate milk and Clif Bar two hours before vs. toast, PB, and cereal). Regardless of how early I wake up I plan to remove peanut butter from the pre-race routine because I think it takes a long time to digest. Not having to deal with this was a huge relief and it made it much easier to manage my fuel throughout the race (~2.5 GUs). Something obvious that must have also helped was running at sea level. Every time I trained at sea level and raced at elevation my legs felt terrible. This time the cards were turned and my legs felt fresh from the beginning.

As for race strategy, I decided to do away with the HR band and go entirely by feel. I only looked at my time at the half way point and mile 20. I knew on a course like this that I would have fast and slow miles so I didn't think it would help to watch every split. I distanced myself from a pack at the Golden Gate Bridge and ran by myself until about mile 10. At that point the guy who took second caught up to me and we ran shoulder to shoulder until about mile 25, when he started to pull away. The guy spoke very little English so after mile 11 my Spanish was exhausted and we had to run the rest of the race in silence. What's amazing about this guy is that he is 45 and his previous PR was 2:40. Unless he lied about his PR, I really don't know how he held up so well and how he was able to manage a decent kick with a mile left. He definitely had more in the tank at the end than me.

For awhile on Sunday I was thinking about how nice the Bay Area is and why it is that I decided to leave. All it took was the 2 hour public transportation commute from SF to the OAK airport and the $4 bagel to convince me that I made the right decision to leave.