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About 3 months ago, I knew that I could make a pretty good run at a sub 3 hour marathon. It was a big motivating factor in my training. I was coming off of an Ultra and I have been doing almost exclusively volume based training for the last year or more. So, my coach hammered me with speed work, which I was reluctant to do, but now I look forward to all of the workouts. (The muggy weather in Savannah is a deterrent to speed work many months of the year!).

Long story short, my training went very well. I admittedly missed my last 18 and 20 mile runs due to family commitments and travel. Just so you know, it happens to everybody! The week of the race, I knew I had the speed I needed for the race, but I wasn’t sure if I had the endurance. I also knew that there was very little margin for error. A 3 hour marathon comes out to 6:53 pace. I’m very comfortable at this pace, but I am also quite aware that I can’t run a lot of sub 6:30 miles at the end of a Marathon. This made me realize there was very little margin of error. I needed to run a race bordering on perfect and I could not afford even 1 bad mile.

I considered starting the race at a relatively slow pace of 7:10 or so and slowly allow myself to work in to a comfortable pace and just see where my legs got me. I can still say pretty confidently that if I had done this, I probably could have come in at 3:03-3:05, which would have been a better time than I ended up with. But, what I wanted to try to do was break 3. Go big or go home. Sometimes the smartest race plan doesn’t necessary align with our goals. I think we always need to go into a race with a very solid race plan. I don’t always advocate going for broke on endurance races, but I’ve done enough marathons that finishing the race wasn’t going to be a big deal and I was quite confident that even with a mega melt down I could still run a PR. So I said F*** it and I went Big!.

So, I don’t want to bore you with all of the details, but I went out at about 6:30 mile pace. I realized quite quickly that the pace was coming easily and everything felt good. I was able to stay right on track for most of the race. First 5k was 6:40 pace, at the 10k I was at 6:44. I finished the first half in 1:28:38 @ 6:46 pace. I went through the 20 mile mark still at 6:50 pace. I knew that I had about 60 seconds in the bank for the final 10k. I just needed to hold 7:03 or so. Well, my 21st mile was my first mile over 7 minutes for the entire race, I though down a 7:03. After that, things got very very ugly. My stomach was bothering me and I was reduced to walking several times in the last 3 miles. Suffice it to say, my final 10k was not much fun!!! I ended that race at 3:09, which was almost 3 minutes faster than last year.

Now when I reflect, I look back at the race and I would not change a thing!! Could I have started to walk when my stomach went sour and maybe saved my self a few minutes by being proactive, sure! Could I have gone out slower and avoided a blow up, probably. There are a lot of things I could have done. But, it isn’t what I did. I went to this race with a specific goal and I went for it, damn the consequences. Go big or go home, I wouldn’t change a single thing about this race. At the end of the day, that is more important than any time or number!!

Thanks!!

Coach Jim