On Sunday, I ran the Boulderthon Half Marathon! And… an extra 5km, such that I don’t have a particularly good official time to brag about, because my official finish time was 1:39:30. But given that translates to a 6:08/mile pace overall, I feel extremely proud of it, even if I don’t have an exciting official time.

The numbers

My official placing was:

• 244/4444 overall
• 187/1949 among men
• 26/245 among men 35 – 39

Unofficially, my actual time on course would have put me at:

• 21/4444 overall (top 0.5%).
• 19/1949 among men (top 1%).
• 1/245 among men 35 – 39 (top 0.4%) — yes, I would have won my age group.

Which is pretty darn good!

You can check out more details on Strava, and if you want to watch me run across the finish line with a look of some fatigue but mostly well, that’s annoying, but I hit the personal target I set for myself when I got back on the course, you can watch the finish line video here (which starts at the point where I’m visible in frame).

I nailed my overall pacing plan again, and averaged 3 – 4s/mile better than I hit on my last pacing training run including those extra miles. (Technically, I went faster than my pacing plan, but every miles was at appropriate relative intensity.) Doubly on the upside, if I chop that extra 5K out and look at my time for just the actual course, I ran a 1:19:57, which is better than I could have hoped: just under 6:06/mile.

A year and a half ago, I set a personal goal to run a half marathon under 1:20:00 before I turn 40 in 2027. I expected that to require finding a very flat course at sea level, and frankly to be a “barely got there even so” kind of thing. Instead, I did it today, on a mildly hilly course a mile above sea level while fighting off gut issues and accidentally running an extra 3.1 miles and therefore intentionally dialing back my pace a bit.

I couldn’t be happier with the performance, though I of course am also profoundly annoyed by the experience overall.

So… what happened?

Training and prep

My training and eating were very similar to what I did for Colfax this spring. For training, I did the On Pace Level 3 plan from 80/20 Endurance instead of the “regular” Level 3 plan as I did in the spring. For the half marathon distance at least, the On Pace plans are sort of a “0.5 extra” version of the 80/20 Endurance plans: they have a decent bit more volume in terms of time and mileage, and in my opinion a slightly harder balance of “workout” type runs.

I really like the 80/20 Endurance plans in general, but the On Pace plans have been particularly good for me. I over-relied on heart rate for a long time because it was so critical for my running when I started out, on the On Pace plans are a forcing function away from that. They have helped me learn to know different paces and efforts by feel. Probably any good plan focused on perceived effort would have done that for me, but the 80/20 plans are the ones that have done it for me.

The other difference for me vs. Colfax was a much stronger emphasis on managing my macros food-wise. After years of annoyance with MyFitnessPal — and thus, years of starting using it and then bailing on it because it was so annoying — I found and started using FoodNoms a few months ago to help me track both intake level and macros, and it has been really helpful on both fronts. I lost a couple pounds and significantly shifted my body fat ratio along the way. That then also helped me with carb-loading in the week before the race, and particularly the day before.

Pre-race

The day before I drove up and met some friends running the race with me, hit the expo to pick up our packets, and had a nice dinner as a group. Boulder is a good 90 minute drive from my place assuming no traffic at all, so I opted to stay with one of those friends instead. Getting up early for a race is one thing, getting up early enough to drive an hour and a half is… something else entirely.

Back at their house, I hung out with them till just before 9pm, then settled into bed. I reviewed the course one more time before going to sleep, but I was focused almost entirely on the pacing dynamics on a mile-by-mile basis, and was not really thinking about the actual course itself. The pacing prep paid off; the part where I just assumed the course would be perfectly well marked and I wouldn’t have to think about it… less so.

On race day, I got up at 4:40am, got dressed, ate some toast with jam, and drank about six ounces of coffee. (We’ll come back to that last bit.) We left at about 5:15, knocked out the ~30-minute drive, and had parked and walked over to the race area by around 6:00am. We were early, but in my experience that is very much preferable to being on the later side, especially in terms of the stress level that goes with trying to find parking, trying to clear the bathroom lines, and so on.

We mostly just hung out for a bit as a result, then hit the bathrooms, and finally did some dynamic warm-ups, and got in the gate. As I was standing there for the last few minutes, I was feeling slightly uncomfortable — like I needed to hit the toilet one more time. I probably should have tried to sneak it in, but I was worried about missing the start if the line was long. This was distinctly not the right call.

Race

The race opens with a 3.7-mile descent at a fairly consistent −1% grade. That creates the key pacing challenge for the course: going out fast on those miles, because you have to make them up with climbs in the back half… but not too fast, so you still have enough legs. I had mapped out the course and was planning to run between 5:50 and 6:00/mile on those opening miles, and then to settle in for an appropriate pace on the flat and climbing sections that make up most of the rest of the route. I went out a decent bit faster than that — I averaged 5:45/mile over the first three miles. It felt great.

My gut, on the other hand, did not. I felt like I needed to go to the bathroom basically from the very start of the race. Working through those first several miles, I was in a fairly constant state of “managing” it mentally — debating, frankly, whether to stop and use the toilet at every aid station I saw. My feeling, though, was that I could indeed manage it, without stopping, and I knew that stopping would cost me a lot of time. So I just kept managing it. That proved out in the end: I never did have to stop during the race, though I quite urgently made my way to a port-a-potty shortly after I finished it.

The gut issues contributed fairly directly to my wrong turn, though. The most uncomfortable part of the run, and the part where I was most concerned that I was going to have to stop, started around mile 4 and kept acting up for the next 3 miles, before finally fading away and not bothering me during the rest of the run. Coincidentally, the half marathon and marathon courses split right at about mile 5. I was in intense discomfort at that point, and I was also running basically alone. There was a small pack still visible ahead of me, and they went right at an intersection.

As I got to the intersection, I was confused. There was no one there to say that the marathon and half marathon went different directions. I could only distinctly remember what the course elevation profile was at that point in the race — not the direction! — because that was what I had focused on in building my race plan. I had only briefly looked at the marathon course, so I did not actually know where it split from the half marathon course — only that they mostly overlapped at the start and end. I could see a line of cones coming back down the lane in front of me, but I could not see anyone that direction, and it looked like it was for a return section. I was half right! It was for the return section of the half marathon on that part of the course, but also for the going-out section. There were, apparently, marks on the ground: HM and M. I did not see them: both because I did not realize until much later in the course that some parts of the course were marked on the ground at all, and because I was so distracted by managing my gut.

I went right.

As my gut issues relented for a bit, I started getting a bad feeling. I saw one sign that said “Marathon Runners” but no corresponding “Half Marathon Runners” sign. And then as I crossed mile 6, I started getting very concerned: I didn’t have the course memorized, but I was pretty sure I was not supposed to be running east at this point. At the same time, I did not want to turn around on a bad feeling alone: how terrible would it be if I screwed up a shot at a great PR just because I was misremembering the course? And I was absolutely on track for a PR, still clocking sub-6:00 miles on downhill stretches and paces ranging from 6:10 – 6:20 when climbing.

When I finally found some people, just past 6.5 miles in, I shouted, “Is this the half or the full course?” Their answer crushed me. I slowed to a stop for a moment, said aloud in frustration, “Well, that’s a PR,” and started back up the way I had come with a bellow.

For the next mile and a half, I got to see a lot of incredulous people who thought I was somehow already returning on the full course (nope: literally impossible) as I made my way back to the point the two races split. That return stretch was actually my slowest in the whole course, as I climbed back up a bit and not only continued to stave off gut issues but wrestled with the frustration of what had happened. I kept going back and forth in my mind between “just finish the thing hard” and “whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Over and over I thought, “No, I can still make something of this.”

The moment I got back to the split point and double checked about the course direction marked my final moment of indecision, as well as my worst moment of gut discomfort for the whole course. (Related? Perhaps!) I paused for a moment, walked for about twenty seconds, and then as my gut finally calmed down, I decided: Finish it hard. See what you’ve got. How much can you do even with having run an extra 3 miles? Find out.

And that’s what I did. Despite having run exactly an extra 5km, I ran every mile from that point to the end of the race faster than my race plan. Every mile. That despite the fact that I was consciously holding back a bit effort-wise because I didn’t know what effect those extra three miles would have.

As I pushed, I started setting goals for the rest of the course:

• Can I catch my two friends who are running it? Yes, and yes. In both cases with an explanation as I passed: “I took a wrong turn and ran an extra three miles!” I enjoyed the mix of disbelief and amusement on their faces.
• Can I break the 1:20:00 mark when I hit the half marathon distance? Yes.
• Can I run sub-1:40:00 for the whole 16.2-mile nonsense I set up for myself, even with the climbs at the end on tired legs? Yes.

In the end, I finished strong. It was a strangely satisfying thing, once I settled in: to pass nearly everyone — running past literally thousands of people and chasing those personal goals, since the official finish was now meaningless.

In the end, I finished at 1:39:30. The extra 5K, including those 20 seconds of walking through indecision and gut pain, took me 19:33; my time “on course” was just under 1:20:00 — a number I had only barely begun to wonder if it was possible to hit in the last couple days before the race. And I did it with an extra three miles on my feet, and I had gas in the tank when I was done, precisely because I was holding back a bit.

I feel frustrated about the outcome, of course. At the same time, I am extremely proud of what I did with the circumstances. I could have quit; I could have just decided to find one of my friends and run it in with them instead (which would have been a good and reasonable thing to do!); I even could have just decided to run the rest of the full marathon and see where it put me (there was enough support on course). I did none of those things: I finished hard and learned a lot more about my current limits.

Learned

A few key lessons I will take into my next race:

1. Memorize the course. No matter what the marking situation is, I should be able to stay on track. As a bonus, I will make a point to have the course on my watch, just in case!

2. No coffee. I had experimented off and on all season with having coffee or not before my long runs, including my half marathon pace runs, and it had in general been fine. As Jaimie pointed out, though: those were on days with none of the extra emotional intensity that can roil the gut anyway. Caffeine in a gel might be fine, but coffee per se is out. (Even great coffee, like I brewed myself that morning, has much higher acidity than caffeinated gels do!)

3. Hit the bathroom again if needed. Managing my gut all morning was a significant distraction, and as I described above that distraction was a major contributor to my taking the wrong turn. I could have jumped into the chute 30 seconds before the start and been fine.

4. I have a sub-1:20:00 in me, even at altitude. I had an inkling going into this race that this might be true, but the way I was thinking about it was: if I have a perfect day, just maybe that could happen. It turns out: it happened even on a very imperfect day. I am a lot stronger and faster than I realized. I am therefore extremely excited to go find out what that means.

Next

On that last note: this evening I signed up for the half marathon event at the Longview Marathon and Half Marathon, this October 12th. The course is a few hundred feet lower than Boulderthon (which is itself a good 1,500 feet lower than where I live), and it has only about half the elevation change of the Boulderthon half marathon course. Race days are race days; there are no guarantees. But I am hoping that two weeks from now, I’ll have another race report, with an official 1:20:00. And then: winter maintenance and looking forward to more races next year!