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Feeling good around mile 20

Where did August and September go? I know where a lot of it went – marathon training. And now I’m done with that for a while and will get a big chunk of time in my life back. As of yesterday I’ve run a marathon. And boy do I hurt today. In training the farthest I ran was 20 miles. Turns out the last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Who’d have thought? Seriously, after mile 23 I had to really focus just to keep my legs moving. I did it though, and it feels pretty good to have done it.

My parents and my brother came to Portland for the weekend, Kim took the day off work, and I saw them cheering me on a few times while I was running. Fortunately they only saw me when I was doing pretty well, which was around mile 20 and at the very end when only the adrenaline from the crowd and knowing I’d soon be done kept me going. I started out strong, got a little worried when I had to stop and tape some blisters around mile 6, picked up the pace from there all the way through mile 20 or so, and then started to hurt around mile 22.

The white stuff on my face is salt from sweat

I really don’t think I’ve felt quite like I felt past mile 23 before. Fortunately I had learned from my training runs how not to get too dehydrated or starving, but my muscles just wanted to shut down after a while despite being hydrated and eating enough liquid gold (honey and molasses). Every mile felt much longer than the one before, and I did in fact slow down quite a bit, but I persevered and crossed the finish line running. Once there I ate everything in site. Oh yeah, my time was 4 hours and 31 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes faster than I though I was going to do it, so I’m pretty pleased.

Everyone asks if I’ll do it again, and I’m definitely holding off on answering that for now. Certainly not anytime in the next few months. I’ll be glad to have such large chunks of time back for other stuff for a while.