Wonderful Time

It's been a couple of days, but I am still feeling great about my marathon on Sunday.  It was a day for running.  Started out cloudy and cool.  Ended up partly sunny and mild.  Temperatures ranged from about 55 to 67.  The Lake Placid Marathon started at 8:00 a.m.  The start was at the bottom of a pretty good hill, but everyone moved up it at a very nice pace.  Once out of town, the course became rolling and very scenic.  Although this was a road marathon, at times we were in the middle of a forest with a bubbling stream following along beside us.  Lake Placid is beautiful area.  We also went right by the ski-jumps used in the 1980 Winter Olympics.  It was hard to believe that people actually ski down this structure and then jump to the bottom.  You really can't appreciate how these are from watching on TV.  With about 350 starters and another 800 half-marathoners, the course was never crowded.  Support was great throughout the day, with aid stations almost every mile.  It was almost overkill for me, so I pretty much just partook every other one after the first six miles since I had to go to the bathroom three times by mile eight.

Although I was running at a very conservative pace, I never really felt comfortable.  It wasn't until about mile ten that I finally felt the groove.  The first half ended up in about 2:03.  But I was feeling pretty good by the halfway point and really ran well between miles ten and twenty.  With six miles to go, I realized if I could just stay nice and steady, I would have a good shot for a sub-4 hour without killing myself.  I had to remind myself that I was still using this as a training run.  I didn't want to run myself into the ground.  But things went well and I finished in 3:57:33, including a very large hill up to the finish.  Negative splits are so satisfying to me these days.  I ended up 124th out of 327 finishers and 8th out of 29 in the 50-59 age group.  I also added another five miles afterward for a 50K day.

And I didn't overdo it since I was able to get in a very nice ten miler on Monday.