Plan was pretty much to stick to the 9:43 pace and that's what we did, not much exciting going on there. Our team did have a few tricks to keep people in our group occupied. One pacer wore bells from mile 12 on. Me, I had a screaming flying "woot monkey" (see avatar) tied to my back, and I carried one of those horns that you see at baseball games (and Savageman). Early on, I got the awful idea to blow the horn once for each mile gained, at each mile marker. Meaning 3 at 3, 4 at 4, etc. The mention of it got the group really pumped to see me do 20 at mile 20, so I stuck with it.

Most of our group stuck with us for a long time, even up the bad hills at mile 18 and into Lake Montebello, which was pretty exciting. There were a lot of new marathoners in our group as well, and they were getting pretty excited at their finish and the prospect of finishing at 4:15. Up 33rd street, we are really hitting the half marathoners, and making more of an effort to go around them. That combined with being at mile 22, had some of our group falling off. But, at mile 22, with me thinking that no one was around, I go to blow the horn, and I hear the now familiar counting "one.. two.. three.. four.." - wow they are still with us! Except, now it means that yes I am blowing 22 times and someone will notice if I don't. :-)

After mile 22 we make the most significant turn of the course - the turn to start heading towards the stadiums and down hill. We hit the gummi station, avoiding slippage, bump over one little hill and then it's downhill the rest of the way. At 23 and 24 I notice that we've lost most of the group, but we still have some left. We told those who felt good to head off ahead of us, and at least one did (yeah!! So cool to see.). One stayed with us, and one fell off slightly behind. At mile 25 and 26 I really struggled to blow that horn 26 times. Everytime I blew it, it was sucking the life out of me. But I wanted to stick with this stupid idea since I started it. Thankfully our mile through Camden Yards was a bit easier so right when I was about to give up on the idea, I had enough strength to finish it off. People said they heard the horn from far far away, so I love the idea if I can handle it.

We end up finishing at 4:15:07. One person we paced stayed from beginning to end, and another person came in at 4:16. Hard to tell where the others finished but I am sure more finished right around us. Pretty exciting to see people through to their goals.

One of these days I am going to start off my marathon day by waking up at 3, eating a bunch of pancakes, and going back to sleep, just to see how well that works. I have read about folks doing that, and I like the idea of topping off, but getting out of bed at 3am just feels like idiocy. Right now I wake up with just enough time to make it to the race, so something light like a gatorade and Clif Bar, is what I do.

Stretched, got some wraps to eat, and changed clothes. Toe nails were black so changing into sandals made a huge impact for my emotional status. I'm not too happy with black toenails. These shoes were already a 1/2 size up, and I have another marathon in 3 weeks, and the JFK 50 in 6 weeks. Maybe I didn't have my shoes tight enough for these downhills? Maybe I need shoes with a bigger toebox? I have Asics GT-2130s right now. Not much time left to figure all this out.