Race Report: Cape Cod Marathon

So... I ran the Cape Cod Marathon yesterday.

I wasn't planning to run a marathon, it just happened. I mean, it was the final race of the New England Championship Series, and my club needed runners, and about three weeks ago it looked like maybe we wouldn't have enough for a team, and I started thinking, how bad would it be REALLY to just run at a leisurely pace for, oh I don't know, about twice as long as my typical long run?

All that marathon training advice -- build up for six months, do long runs every other week up to 20-22 miles, run high mileage and then taper -- I didn't do any of that. My mileage was pathetically sparse. My longest long run was 16 miles, which I did last weekend, just to see whether I could run for two hours straight. Of course, the marathon would take 3 hours or more, but hey, what's an extra hour of running?

I did eat spaghetti Saturday night, but that was about the extent of my marathon preparation. On the other hand, I did have a healthy fear of the distance, which would stand me in good stead on race day.

Fearing the dreaded wall, I started slowly. I started so slowly that the guy I was running with, who also wanted to start slowly, got impatient and left me behind after a mile. But I stuck to my tortoise 7:15 pace. I didn't feel that good. My shins hurt a little bit, and I was worried about a mysterious pain in my right knee that had popped up during the week. So I chilled, and stuck to my plan, ignoring the many grandmothers sprinting by me in the early miles.

If you ever run a marathon, let me tell you, they're weird. You go through so many good and bad patches in a marathon that when it's over you feel like you've watched a whole season of episodes from some bizarre reality show series. I felt bad at the start, but I knew that I could run 16 miles, and I figured I might start feeling better at some point. And I did! Amazingly, at about 7-8 miles, without anything obvious happening, I realized that the miles were just kind of clicking by, and I was in a much better mood. I was still running my 7:15 miles, but now I felt like it was easy... and no one was passing me.

My shins felt just the same as they had when I started. And now I was beginning to enter some strange mental state where I was keenly aware of everything around me but completely detached. I was observing the runners around me, but felt serenely unaffected by their presence. At 11 miles, there was a big hill. I passed a couple of people without really trying to, and felt like going uphill was actually slightly easier on my legs than running on the flat. For some reason, this gave me a lot of confidence.

I reached 13.1 miles, and started doing odd mental calculations. I started trying to figure out what my finishing time was if I stopped and walked the rest of the way. I didn't feel like walking, but I just wondered. Would I walk at 4 miles an hour? 5 miles an hour? And then I thought that if I walked, I would be out on the roads for a really long time!

At 16 miles, I thought, "well, here I am at the distance of my longest long run. I'll probably have to stop any moment now." So I said to myself I would just run one more mile. At 17 miles, I said I would run to 18. At 18 I said I would just run to 19. At 19, I saw a friend of mine ahead of me, and he didn't look good at all. I decided I would run until I hit 20 miles. At 20 miles, with my friend now receding behind me, I didn't feel much different than I had at 16. I decided to run to Mile 21.

At Mile 22, I caught up to a fairly young guy who was running as part of a marathon relay team. He was kind of goofy, waving to the spectators a little bit and just generally having a good time. I decided I would run behind him for a while and that helped lighten the otherwise grim mood I had developed as I thought about how much pain I was going to be in on Monday.

The pain my shins had never gotten worse, but a lot of other parts of my body were aching pretty badly by this point. That's another strange thing about marathons. If you go into them with some sort of physical problem, it's always some OTHER part of your body that fails. Go in with a sore calf, and your hamstrings cramp up. Anyway, my hamstrings were pretty sore, and my hip flexors were complaining loudly, and I was suffering every time I had to run downhill.

At 24 miles, it occurred to me that I was probably going to finish. It surprised me.

The last mile, I still had energy in my body. I had been drinking some foul-tasting sports drink that had been provided at the aid stations, and although I was hurting, I was not bonking. So it seemed like the best way to make the hurting stop sooner was to speed up. So I did that and from mile 25 to 26 ran a 6:49 mile. It felt blazingly fast.

As I saw the finish line banner in front of me, I felt a spasm of joy that was so pure and simple that it almost made me laugh. I had been running for 3 hours and 7 minutes, and I was going to be able to stop now. How great was that?