I was using this as a training run before the Berlin Marathon at the end of September. My goal was to start out easy with 8:30's and then gradually increase the pace if I felt good keeping things no tougher than comfortably hard. I feel like I executed that pretty well especially after looking at the splits. I was attempting to push pace a little more on the back half of the race and yet things still felt pretty good, so I was happy.

As far as hydration & nutrition, I have been subscribing to less is more and it's proven to work well for me even in my longest training runs. My first stop for water was maybe 30-40' into the race and then I probably stopped 3 more times. Each time it was a swig or two and then back running. The last stop was maybe mile 9-10 and that was a sip of Gatorade. I only had one gel at about the 70 minute mark. This worked more than adequately for me.

Nothing.

A couple bottles of water and ate a ton of food including pizza, PB&J sandwich, pretzels and another banana (I think that was a record 3 banana's for me before 9:30am).


In light of my peak miles week coming up after this HM, I intentionally did not try to PR this race.


Great race on a great, scenic route.