No Guts...No Glory

Another marathon experience has come and gone. This one started out in promising fashion. I was up early Sunday, picked up a couple of my fellow North Shore Striders in Wenham and headed to Lowell for the Baystate Marathon. The weather was nice and cool, in the low 40s, and dry, with none of the strong winds that were around on Saturday.

I found a good free parking spot in a bank lot and met up with Lisa, one of my fellow runners from Reach the Beach. We were both hoping to run sub-3:45s; we figured we'd start out fairly controlled with the idea of running in the 8:20 to 8:30 per mile range and see how we were doing during the home stretch of the race. She had a Garmin and pace band and would be monitoring the pace throughout. We got off to a good start and let a lot of folks sprint past us as we tried to keep our adrenaline under control.

Everything was going smoothly until mile 9, when I noticed I was getting a slight side stitch. Essentially a cramp in the rib cage, stitches occasionally plague me at inopportune times. There's no way to predict or prevent them. But sometimes I can run through them and I tried to control my breathing and do just that. It worked for a while, and the cramp went away. And then came back. I was able to keep plugging through mile 17 as we were keeping about an 8:30 pace, which would have been good for a 3:42 (a minute better than my PR in New Jersey two years ago). But I was really starting to labor and was getting concerned that I was going to need to slow down soon.

That's the added pressure of running with somebody. You don't want to hold her back from achieving her goal. So I told her to go on ahead without me. It was better for both of us. I needed to shift my goal to a more realistic one. I started doing a run/walk method of five minutes running followed by one walking, and that worked for several miles. The cramps didn't return after a while and eventually I started extending my runs. I didn't worry about my pace anymore, just finishing. I was hoping to finish around 3:50, but it became apparent that wasn't going to happen, either. Finally, after mile 23, I just decided to run the rest of the way if I could and was able to do just that and finish somewhat strong in 3:57.

It certainly wasn't what I was hoping for (and 11 minutes slower than my Baystate time in 2007), but it was still a sub-4 hour marathon and my 14th overall. In the back of my mind the whole time was the knowledge that I wasn't going to do a spring marathon. It'll be nice to recharge the old batteries and do some shorter races for a while. During the race, I started thinking maybe this would be my last marathon, but I was pretty bummed with my performance. I'm sure I'll eventually be hankering to do a fall marathon, but I'll deal with that decision later. For now, I'm just going to heal up and get back to playing hockey and enjoying running.

Next up is the Devil's Chase, a 6.66-mile (bwahahaha) race on Halloween in Salem. Take it away, drunk DLR: