The course is nice and flat, but the marathon course runs around the bay almost the whole time so when it is windy it is Windy!!! My idea was to use my group members to break the wind but it didn't really seem to help!

Miles 1-5 7:25, 7:25, 7:28, 7:34, 7: 22

Obviously we broke out at a nice pace significantly faster than the 7:38 avg we were supposed to maintain for 3:20. I didn't really mind though because I figured it would help us when we lost time later during the windy parts. Mainly I was just trying to relax here and conserve my energy.

Miles 6-10 7:30, 7:28, 7:35, 7:24, 7:29

Still going strong here, I took the first of my gels and was starting to poor water on my at the aid stations. Definitely hotter than it had been during training during GA. I was still nervous about whether my pace was okay here since I had never ran a marathon, much less any distance longer than 10 miles trying to go at a decent clip. I am used to running much shorter paces where you are in intense pain the whole time and I wasn't sure if what we were doing was too easy or would bite me later.

Miles 11-15 7:21, 7:34, 7:57, 8:23, 7:59

Okay this is where we lost a bit of the magic. The course is designed so at the beginning, we start with the halfers, run by ourselves and then rejoin. Unbelievable, our pacer, bless'em, randomly decided after running up the bridge and rejoining the halfers, that we had been going the wrong way! So he turned around and sprinted back down the bridge yelling at all the marathoners to turn around!! So of course all of us that were around followed him back Down the bridge about a quarter mile back down the course where he was frantically trying to find the way, only it turns out that we had been going the right way all along!! With that, the pacer, (who obviously felt terrible but people were Mad) sprinted back up the bridge going the right way again trying to make up time, and promptly lost most of the members of the 3:20 group, including myself. I wasn't that upset, because I figured that going half a mile off course is an easy way to decrease my time even More for the next marathon! Ha! The good thing about this is I clocked a decent half time 1:39ish that would put me right on target for 3:20, only the hard part was yet to come.

Miles 16-20 7:37, 7:44, 7:48, 8:13, 8:03

Okay the wind was really starting to howl here and rain was coming down intermittently. I still felt good breathing wise, but had to slow down during the wind. Also my right calf had been bothering me and about miles 21 my calves and quads totally seized up, turning my normal stride into a shuffle.

8:04, 8:17, 8:30, 8:44 (yikes!)8:18, 8:15

My legs were killing me the last several miles and so was the wind. Despite this, I was sooo excited that I was going to finish and happy with getting in the 3:20s considering the weather and pacer debacle. At mile 25 my dad came back out on the course and ran with me the last mile and was super encouraging. This was definitely the best part of the race. I felt like we were running a 6 minute mile and I really tried to Sprint at the end (although by my pace it is obvious that I was not really sprinting!) I clearly saw the clock at 3:27:35ish when I passed my fortunately John was able to get a picture of the clock too which would come into play later!



Not run with the pacer, get my chip checked, and run more miles!!

After hobbling back to the hotel on my shot calves we decided to go down to the awards ceremony in case I placed in my division. So we get there and I am not listed as participating, finishing, nothing!! Complete bummer. I talked to the race officials who said that hopefully they would get it sorted out within a week. To their credit, they did post a time for me later that they must have pieced together from photo evidence but it wasn't my real time and I didn't get any seconds credit from chip time. I was still bummed out because I worked so hard for every second of my time, but am thankful that at least there is some record so I can use the record for BQing. Overall, I was really happy with the experience and it was really fun to do something like this as a family event.


I probably need to be running more miles to support something like a marathon. Prior to Oct I hadn't jogged more than 10 miles a week in a least a year and a half so this was a little quick to be ramping up. (This might have contributed to the fact that I literally couldn't walk the next day!) I am excited to run consistently for another 6 or 7 months and perhaps give the marathon distance another try in the fall/winter of 2009.


I had to dock the race for the foibles that happenned to me, however I have to say that I have run other events there in past years and it has always been a great experience before. However, this is the first year I actually trained so I really counted on everything working correctly!