Showing posts with label Big D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big D. Show all posts

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Big D = Lots of Hills

I decided in my infinite wisdom that a marathon one week out from Boston was a good idea. After all I needed to get in around 70 miles this week and we won't live in Dallas next year so I HAD to run this race. Makes perfect sense. Oh and you read these stories of Ultra runners who go out and run a 50 mile race and then marathon the next day and Marathon Maniacs run back to back marathons all the time. Ok I am done justifying my insanity. I actually still think the marathon was a good idea especially when the idea was for it to be a training run, not to run too fast, just to go out and get in some good clean miles. Yah, well that all went out the window. There were a myriad of reasons running through my head as to why it would be good to push myself today. I had read my friend Heather's Race Report for a 5K she did awesome in yesterday, I had just read some Ultra Blogs, and well I just started to think that I needed to run hard and outside my comfort zone more. I really want to do well in Phili and it seems I really need to step up my training if that is going to happen and on top of all of that, it is just fun to run hard. Or at least it was fun for the first 15 miles or so. So I just went with it. You are going to laugh but I didn't look at the course elevation changes before the race so, I had no idea, this course was HILLY, like even the hills had hills, it was brutal. I charged on. I ran the first 13.1 miles in 1:49 and at that point I still felt great. It was about mile 17 or so where my wheels came off and I had to hang on for dear life. I had to concentrate on just running. That toe that has been numb since Rocky well it picked today to really hurt, so I kept searching for even pavement to reduce the pressure on it. In the end I finished with a 3:45 (2nd in my age group and somewhere in top 100 overall) and I am happy with that but, I know I can push more. I had already run close to 50 miles this week going into the marathon so, I am hoping with a few days of light running next week I can kick it into high gear at Boston and if the weather stinks, I am just going to enjoy Boston for all it is worth and not worry about time. There is nothing worse than stressing when the weather is kicking your booty.