Tuesday, July 14, 2015

My Seriously Late 2015 Country Music Marathon Race report!

Well, I guess better late than never!  I think I finished this race about 3 months ago, so this one might be a bit fuzzy in my mind.

I'll keep it simple; I just wanted to survive this run, since I hadn't gone that far before (spoiler: I made it!)  But I will tell you that the race course kicked my butt hard!  The first 8 miles were in town and near large crowds which really pumped me up, maybe too much, because once we deviated out and away from the half marathoners, it got real lonely.  At about the 13 mile mark, my compression sleeve on my left leg started to cut into my achilles tendon, and that hurt!  So I stopped, rolled it up a bit, and continued on.

The second worse part was when we got to when we re-merged with the half marathoners and they got to turn into LP Field (where the Titan's play!) and just a short three-foot fence kept me from finishing it off myself, but I continued on. Up. The. Hill.  This hill was a gradual climb over the next mile or so, and was bad, but I kept running up it and not dying.

I pushed thru the 20 mile mark in 3 hours, so I thought, "Cool, I have an hour or less to do my 10K", since I broke the race down into 10 miles - 10 miles - 10K (6.2 miles), but that last loop in the park was a killer.  The temps were starting to rise, crowds were sparse, and I was hurting.  But I walk/ran thru the water points to help it and in the last little climb, got an ice pack (about 5 miles too late) and a drink of super salty gatorade, which hit the spot.  I was able to run fast (read: faster than I had been running) and came across the line just short of my C goal, in 4:03.

My stats for the run are:

44 of 182 in my AG (24%)
425 of  1419 in my gender (30%)
575 overall out of 2635 (22%)
9:16 pace
Burned 4196 calories

Well, now that I finished this RR, I have Tri Waco coming up again in two weeks, I haven't swam a stroke all year, and my training is way off, what could go wrong?!