My training for the Maine Coast Marathon was a bumpy ride
from my marathon PR (3:17:30) at the Manchester City Marathon in November
through the absolute high of shattering my expectations at the Jones 10 Miler
(1:00:30 for a PR by 6:09 over my PR set in 2012) to the lows of a calf strain,
Achilles Tendonitis, my big toe splitting open on a long run and bruising the
top of my left foot by running 19 miles in a pair of trainers that I had tied
MUCH too tight.
My track work all winter was the corner stone of smashing my
PRs at the 15k, the 10 Mile and the Half Marathon but tendon issues started
hampering my top end speed in the last week of February and stayed with me
through the end of March. In April I started transitioning away from the track
to focus more on hitting my long runs, hill workouts and tempo runs. Some poor
decisions with my footwear cut into my hill work.
My Marathon Pace runs on the treadmill were smooth and easy
but Planet Fitness has the mills shut down after an hour so I could only get up
to about 9.5 miles in and then had to call it a day. I was never able to
transition that work to a really solid outdoor Marathon Pace run. I got up to
about 12.5 miles at a 6:34 doing laps of Fresh Pond a few weeks before the race
but never got a workout that pushed into the hard half of the marathon.
Of course the big news in April was the attack at the Boston
Marathon. I resolved that I would be there next year. I ran the Good Times 5k
the day after Boston and clocked 17:58 which was good for a weeknight fun run
but was the slowest I’ve run at the 5k in about a year and left me wondering
where my speed had gone.
By the time May rolled around, my 1:20:50 at the New Bedford
Half Marathon was a distant memory. I had logged a lot of easy miles (234 miles
in April) and had some good long runs but I just didn’t know what kind of speed
I might have on race day.
Then it happened.
The Maine Coast Marathon published the list of entrants and
their projected finish times.
The list was sortable by projected finish time so of course
I that’s what I did. The fastest projected finish time was 2:50 for a kid named
Steven McCarthy who had a marathon PR of ~2:51. Now I do recognize that 2:51 is
much faster than 3:17. There were a bunch of us projecting 2:55. I was hoping
that someone would sign up who could run <2:40 so that I won’t have the
temptation of chasing down the leader.
I thought that my hopes had been realized the day before the
race when I saw D5k legend Junyong Pak (he had too many racing accomplishments
to list here, but has a <2:33 Boston Marathon PR and Bui’s first snowshoe
race: http://fearthechicken.blogspot.com/2013/03/snow-shoe-is-good-shoe.html)
I figured that Pak would take off and win the thing while we
mere mortals could focus on just running our time trials to get into Boston
2014. That wasn’t the case. Pak was there to cheer on Yvette Tetreault who
rocked out to a >1 hour PR.
To a disciplined runner this would not have mattered. The
smart runner would not have cared what the winner was doing. The smart runner
would run the race that he or she had trained for. I had started training for a
2:55 and then I changed gears to chase after 2:50 until the Achilles tendonitis
convinced me to back off and try for 2:55-3:00.
I chatted with Chris Hancock for a bit, gave Sarah a kiss
goodbye and lined up one row back from the front to make sure I went out easy
and didn’t get caught up racing.
None of that mattered. I had a bib on my chest and it was a
race.
I was “good” for the first mile. I was running with two kids
from the Colby track team who were also thinking 2:55-3:00. We were running
easily enough that we were able to chat as we let the leader develop a lead of
about 50 meters on us in the first 5 minutes. Two other guys joined us and we
turned into a bonafide chase pack. We went through mile 2 in around 13:00 but
all confirmed with each other that the marker was short. None of us were
wearing a GPS watch but we knew that we weren’t running 6:30s, we were right on
target at 6:40.
We slowed over the next mile just in case and went through
the third mile in 19:22. Steven had almost disappeared over the horizon on us
by this point but we could still see the flashing lights of the pace car. I was
leading the chase pack at this point and decided that this mile marker was
short too. Over the next half mile or so I heard the rest of the chase pack
fall off so I decided to drop the hammer and try to catch Steven. I started
closing the gap and was able to surprise Sarah by coming up to the corner at ~4
miles in second place hammering away at a pace in the low 6:20s to upper 6:10s.
I eventually closed the gap back down to about 25-50 meters
but I could feel my empty stomach screaming about the effort. I forced down
some Lifesavers and backed off the gas. By mile 8 I had company again. Timothy
Mallard of the Gate City Striders had caught me and we ran together for a
while. By mile 10 he had dropped me to go after Steven and I was again running
all alone but was now in third place.
I went by the marker at mile 13 in about 1:24:22 and knew
that I wasn’t going to be able to finish strongly. I felt like I was going to
hit the wall and crash unless I back my pace off significantly. With the BQ as
my number one goal at this race I didn’t hesitate to slow down. It only took
another two miles for David Murphy and John Williams to catch and pass me.
By mile 16 I had fallen back to about 6th place
when I ran past where Erica Zornig was watching the race. She hopped in and
paced me through the next half mile. I had been almost ready to start walking
at that point but she got me past that and I was on my way towards the last
10k.
I was on my way, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I
gave back a lot of time between miles 17 and 20 and fell back to 10th
place by mile 22. I figured that the past 9 miles of rest were enough and Sarah
was driving along the course and cheering me on so I gritted my teeth and
worked my way back up to 8th place and across the finish line in
3:02:47.
A short while later Chris came in at 3:04:37 for 10th
place and an Age Group win. Almost as soon as I was done congratulating Chris,
Sarah and I went off in search of some showers. For the record: the showers at
the Maine Coast Marathon have really nice water pressure.
So all in all: I got a new PR by 14:44 and I got the BQ by
2:14 but missed my goals of (a) running <3:00, (b) running <2:55, (c)
running <2:50 and (d) winning the Maine Coast Marathon. I’ll still happy
with the result if not how I got there. I’ll take it as a learning experience
and try to run a more even split next time to get the <3:00. Ending on a
positive note: going sub-3 sounds a hell of a lot easier now that I’m sitting
on a 3:02:47 PR rather than a 3:17:30.
Now it’s time to pick out the next one. I’m looking at the
Drake Well Marathon, the Quebec City Marathon and the Lehigh Valley Marathon as
potential races at the end of this summer. My shake out runs have been quite
comfortable this week, including a 5.39 run at 6:59 pace the day after the
marathon so maybe I can sneak a race in at the end of June or early July if
Sarah and I are not too busy with potential house things.
I enjoyed a nice cold Harpoon Summer when Sarah and I got
home from the race; I probably won’t be posting regularly until after Sarah and
I get back from Ireland in August so until then enjoy the summer and have some
beers because I’ll be back to posting useless lists of daily runs to annoy any
of you who bother reading this thing.
Cheers!
