I had a great time in NYC over marathon weekend. I now want to go back with my family and be a tourist. I stayed at a friend's house in West Nyack about 30 miles North of NYC. It was really nice getting caught up with him and his family. His name is Jason and he deserves more credit than anyone for helping coach me through creating a running habit way back in 2012. Jason was the guy that I reached out to for every ache and pain. He helped reassure me that it would all be OK as long as I stuck with the habit.
I wanted to get plenty of experience getting around in the city, particularly on the subway before race day so it worked out well that some friends all wanted to meet up for lunch on Friday. I took the train from the suburbs to Grand Central Station and then walked to the Javitz convention center, got my bib and went over to the pizza place we agreed to meet. After lunch it was time to play on the subway, so I took a subway ride over to the South Ferry Station to look around. Parking seemed more scarce than I expected so I started having doubts about my plan to park at the ferry terminal the morning of the race. Some more walking and subway rides followed by a train ride back to the 'burbs and Friday was done.
Saturday, Jason and I went for a jog to a local track for the carb load. I kept asking him to slow down on the way over :-) Once we were there it took a few minutes to psych myself up for the 1 mile of pain but eventually I got the courage and took off. The first lap was around 5:15 pace which immediately sent warning signals off. I started to slow up a bit, but gathered myself together and wound up with a 5:32 mile. I need to start doing track work, that could get interesting if I was used to it. I downed some ridiculously strong Gatorade, called the carb load done and then we went into the city to see Alex Hutchinson speak. It was a good talk, but most of the time it was him interviewing Emma Coburn. She was interesting and has had a phenomenal career, but I really wanted to hear Alex's insights. I got a copy of his book so I'll guess I'll just have to read what he thinks later. Alex Hutchinson did give one short story about his college running career that was amazing. For 3 years he chased a goal to break 4 minutes in the 1500 meter event. He was consistently running in the low 4's but just couldn't get that 3:xx. Then one day on a 200 meter indoor track when the competition wasn't very good he came through the first lap and the timer shouted, "27 seconds". He immediately went into a panic that he'd gone out too fast, but after self checking his status realized that he didn't feel that bad. The next lap was called out at 57 seconds and he started to panic again, but again decided that he wasn't blowing up. After a little while his confidence grew and he decided he was having a great day so he went for it. He PR'd with a 3:5x and took something like 7-8 second off his previous best. Later, he was talking to one of his teammates and asked, "So, what did you think about that first lap of mine?" and his friend answered that it was pretty normal at 31 seconds. Apparently, the timer had messed up and was calling all of the split 3+ seconds faster than they really were! He still broke 4 minutes by a lot, but it was all based on the "lie" of his fast first lap.
Sunday morning my alarm went off at 3am and I was out of the house by 3:30. I'd toy'd with the idea of taking the commuter train into Manhattan but there weren't any early enough to let me transfer to the subway and make it to the ferry by 5:30am for my scheduled departure. At 4:10am, after a delay for an accident on the west side highway, I got to the parking garage near the 86th street subway station. It was closed. I tried 5 parking garages, 3 of which were advertised on an app as "24 hours" and also had signs saying the same. All 5 parking garages were closed. I happened upon some on street parking on 90th street so I grabbed it and walk about 3/4 of a mile to the subway station. I missed the subway to the ferry terminal by the swipe of a metro card. When I got down into the station, the train was there and the doors were open. I had to swipe the card twice before I got in because it didn't read the first time. That extra swipe meant I missed the train. No big deal, they are scheduled to come every 10 minutes. However, the next train that came was the 2 red line and I wanted the 1 red line. The 2 might have gotten me to the terminal, but it wasn't obvious so I waited 20 minutes to get the 1 that definitely would stop where I needed it. After all of the delays I stepped off the subway at 5:27am and in theory had 3 minutes to get into the ferry terminal and on the boat. It turns out they were a couple minutes late opening the doors for the ferry so I was fine getting on. I knew that I'd be OK taking a later ferry but with everything that had happened I didn't want to keep 'losing time' just in case there were other delays.
After a pleasant ride to Staten Island, there was a long walk out of the terminal and over to the busses. We were then shuttled a few miles to the athlete's village where I found a good spot to wait against a light pole for 2 hours or so until it was time to walk over to the start corrals. A few minutes after getting to the corral, Mark, a fellow runner from Rochester found me. It was pretty awesome. We met a few weeks ago at a 5k near home, although I recognize his name from race results over the years. At the 5k I challenged him to come find me and he did. We saw each other at the expo, but then again in the starting corral. It was really nice to get to know him better. It turns out that he used to be an infrequent poster over on the RWOL message boards! We had talked about Boston previously and he put things together and guessed that I might have been a regular poster on the RWOL dailies. I tried to convince him to come join us on Strava. I hope it works out.
When it came time to be released from the corral for the walk over to the start line I got caught with my pants down. Literally. I decided to take off my throw away jeans at exactly the wrong time, so I was stuck getting my shoes back on while all of corral B walked away from us and then corral C started coming through. Mark graciously waited for me and we went over to the start together. Instead of having 200-300 people in front of me, there was more like 1500 people. I couldn't see the 3 hour pace group that I was hoping to run with. I could see the 3:05 pace group but there were several hundred people between us. It was fun to have a running buddy at the start and I assumed that Mark and I would wind up running together. I warned him that I can get chatty in races and that there will be no offense taken if he ever wanted to tell me to stop talking during the race.
After the national anthem and some other ceremonies, the announcer let us know that the starting command would be, "Ready. Set. Howitzer." He wasn't joking. That cannon was loud when it went off. The uphill on the Verrazano bridge seemed to go on forever. It was more work than I expected on the way uphill. I didn't feel great and had even wondered before the start if I might have left my race in Manhattan with all the walking I'd done in previous days. The field thinned out pretty quick and it was pretty easy to get past people. I probably had to nudge about a dozen people on the uphill to scoot past. Mark had warned me that the uphill on this bridge would be my slowest mile and having been told this helped keep me calm. Somewhere on the bridge, I lost Mark. He was the smart one and probably wasn't trying to bob and weave through the crowd the way I was. I glanced at my watch once and it had me at 8:XX for current pace which seemed way slower than I expected so I started working harder even though I didn't feel great. Once I crested the hill at the top of the bridge I started feeling very good. I started bombing the downhill. I didn't think to run light, I just ran hard and enjoyed it. I only had to nudge 2 or 3 people on the downhill. After getting off the bridge there was a short steep hill and a couple of sharp turns. People were catching me on the uphill, but I didn't really care. I started to notice that my legs hurt. Once I got through the couple of turns and the course flattened out I started to do a self assessment. Wow, my legs really hurt. I'm breathing really heavy. Huh, my HR is 169. Time to reset. 169 is on the low side of half marathon effort and quite a bit harder than the 160-165 that I am usually at for a marathon. Any pre-race strategy was gone and now it was time to ease the HR down to 165 and hold it there. I didn't know it at the time, but mile 2 was run at 5:59 pace. No wonder my legs hurt! I ignored the pace and other metrics on my watch in favor of nothing but HR. The miles ticked by quick. At mile 7 I did a self assessment. I knew I was under 7 minute pace for the average, but not sure how far and frankly I didn't care. The most important thing to me at the time was how I felt and wow, my legs hurt...but not any worse than mile 2. I guess I'm just going to keep rolling along and watching HR to see where this goes.
First 7 miles were, (pace/HR), 7:09/161, 5:59/170, 6:51/167, 6:43/166, 6:49/165, 6:43/164 and 6:51/164.
Around mile 8 there is a sharp right turn where people started to bunch up a bit. In the middle of the crowd I saw the 3 hour pace group. I never, ever expected to catch them. For a moment I thought, here we go...time to see how long I can hang with them, but right after the turn there was a long slight uphill and my HR started to climb. I let them go and tried to get back down to 165 bpm while they slowly pulled away. Not long after this I started noticing some HR drops. At first it wasn't an issue, I'd look again a few seconds later and my watch would show me a number. But then as the miles went on it kept getting worse and worse until sometime around mile 12 or so I started ignoring HR entirely because every time I looked it was blank. This made it pretty hard. I could have switched over to trying to run a pace but instead just focused on trying to keep the same perceived effort from when I could see my HR.
Miles 8 through 13 were, 7:03/165, 7:10/164, 6:48/164, 7:11/164, 6:49/163, 7:08/162
I was pretty happy to see that I made it through the first half in 1:30:XX but could feel way too much fatigue starting to take hold. I'd been taking lots of salt and plenty of Gu. Once I realized I'd dug a hole in the first 2 miles then taking plenty of salt/Gu was part of the strategy to hold the line on falling apart. I did another self assessment and figured that even though it was still early the time to pull the emergency cord was getting close. Mile 14 became the time when I figured I'd take my first hit of 100 mg of caffeine to smooth things out. I'd had some in Gu, but maybe more could take the edge off of the fatigue. Prior to race day, I'd had zero caffeine for about 4 days. Usually I like to go without longer, but this time it didn't happen. The extra caffeine kicked in around mile 15 or so and I felt noticeably better. Out of nowhere the idea to take 100 mg more every 3 miles to try and stack the effect came to mind and I immediately started looking forward to mile 17. I had been warned about the 59th street bridge that would be at mile 15ish, but once I got onto the lower deck with that steep climb and the tunnel feel I was loving it. My watch started working again and I saw that the uphill got me back to 165bpm, which made me happy, but even more so I loved the way my legs felt. I don't like uphill running, but this uphill felt great. Once I was forced to take small quick steps on the climb a lot of the soreness in my legs disappeared. The downhill wasn't as much fun, but I survived it and just kept trying to get the legs moving. By mile 17 fatigue was back in full swing and I was really hoping caffeine would work some more magic. It helped, but not as much or for as long. Somewhere around mile 18 or so I got passed by the 3:05 pacer. He seemed to be running alone. There wasn't a mass of folks, just a dude carrying a sign. I was actually really happy to see him. There wasn't a lot of distance left to race, and while I was fading it seemed very plausible that I could fade and still wind up under 3:10. Around mile 19 or so, I think on the uphill of the bridge from Manhattan to the Bronx, I got passed by Mark. We exchanged some nice words encouraging each other. He looked great! On the downhill of the same bridge I started to get a sense of vertigo. The concrete was new with crisp, deep, lines carved into it and something about the pattern made me dizzy to look at. I ran with my eyes closed for a few seconds and then opened them trying to stare up and away until I could get away from the lines that made the whole world seem wobbly. I was hurting and mile 20 to get another 100 mg of caffeine couldn't come fast enough.
Miles 14 through 20 were, 7:12/163, 7:43/163, 7:40/165, 7:26/162, 7:21/165, 7:32/164, 8:00/161
I felt nothing from the last attempt to fight fatigue with caffeine and it was clear things were going to get ugly. The one thing I had to look forward to was that Carolyn (Running...to catch the ice cream truck) was going to be around 20.75. I started watching for her teammates in purple. Eventually, I saw a group of a dozen or so people. I couldn't pick her out of the lineup but I went over to them and yelled, "Ice Cream Truck!". They screamed back in appreciation. I would love to know if they had any idea what I was talking about. I then moved back more towards the center of the road until a couple hundred yards later Carolyn spotted me and starting yelling my name so I had to run over to her on the sideline to say hello. It was really nice to have the boost, but it didn't last long. The bridge back into Manhattan wasn't too bad, but soon after the turn onto 5th avenue I saw a long hill in the distance. I'm done. There's no way. Sure enough, I got most of the way up the hill and then the walking started. It was only about 50 strides. I knew sub 3:10 was gone, but figured it would be no big deal to get to the finish line with plenty of time to spare on a BQ. It was hard to get running again but I kept plugging away with the occasional walk break added in. This was getting ugly.
Miles 21 through 23 were, 7:54/163, 8:08/160, 8:31/156
I did some quick fuzzy brain math and with ~5k to go I just had to stay under 10 minutes a mile to have a nice healthy BQ under 3:20. No problem. I might even get a BQ-5. Then I saw my watch. The first of those 3 miles was a 9:24 and I really, really, wanted to walk more. Crap. There was nothing left to do but suck it up to run what I could, walk what I must and see what happened. The crowd was great and I got nice feedback with louder cheering whenever walk went back to run but I was mostly in my own little world. People were flying by me left and right. I didn't catch any of my splits but when I saw the mile 26 marker I knew I had the BQ. It didn't seem like there was any reason to put on a show with a hard finish so I greeted the mile 26 marker with another walk. I pulled my phone out for the jog to the finish line and snapped some pics along the way.
Miles 24 through Finish were, 9:25/154, 8:48/155, 8:48/157, 8:44(pace)/157
After the finish, I really wanted to sit down. There were lots of volunteers but I saw one runner had found a seat on the edge of some of the finish line decoration so I joined him. He was pretty out of it and I tried to convince him to go to the medical tent but he refused. After a few minutes I started the long walk to the car. If you include the different walking segments to get to the subway, ferry, bus, athlete's village and starting line together with the 2 mile walk to the car at the finish I'm pretty sure you could call this one a 50k.
Final result: 3:16:52 for 26.38 miles was 7:28 pace with 162 bpm avg HR.
