Snohomish River Run: Marathon #29, Survived from Mile 18
This past Sunday I got up at 4am, drove to Snohomish River Run and ran my 4th marathon race of the year (#29 including non-races since 2023): chip time was 3:38:09 (8’19”/mi) and watch time was 3:36:03 (8’14”/mi) — slightly faster as the watch recorded 26.48mi. I placed 51 out of 200 runners, 42 out of 133 males, and 6 out of 12 in my age division.
Weather was perfect — ~45°F, cloudy with NO RAIN! For the first 17mi I stuck to plan: stay sub-8’/mi and ahead of the 3:30 pacer. Hit the half marathon at 1:42 (7’50”/mi). Trouble started at 18mi on the park trails: gravels and winding & bumpy path threw me off, and my left calf (which had been warning me since a few days earlier) started protesting. From there it was survival mode. I regrouped a couple times and managed to finish at 7’55”/mi.
(Life lesson: what do you do at mile 18 when you realize everything’s going haywire?)
A couple notes:
- After getting home, I found two decent-sized gravels lodged in the deep groove of my left AlphaFly — and of course it had to be the left. Design could use some work…
- You may recall I trained for this marathon with CoachGPT. Its postmortem about the race was pretty encouraging. My main issue with CoachGPT however is that it never says no. It always stays positive and encouraging. But instead it perhaps should’ve told me to dial back my goal a bit, given my calf issues…
Also a little progress note: I’m now crossing 2,100mi running for the year! I may have one last marathon race left this year. We’ll see!
Originally posted on LinkedIn.