Assumed audience: People interested in endurance running (or endurance sports more generally), or who just like to hear what I am up to as a runner.
Today, I ran my first marathon! The juicy bits:
- Official time: 2:48:39
- Official pace: 6:26/mile
- Official placing:
- 17th overall
- 17th among men
- 8th among men
30 – 39
- Goals:
- Finish: yep!
- Sub-2:50:00: yep!
- Boston Qualifier: yep!1
If you’re on Strava, you can check out the activity there!
The rest of this post is a deep dive into how the race went, including:
Feel free to skip around to what seems interesting to you! (N.b. there are a number of links throughout to various products I use, and these are all just regular links, not affiliate links!)
I will summarize by saying that this was an immensely rewarding experience. It is really amazing to see what the human body — your own body! — is capable of doing, and equally to see how deeply in tune with your own body you can get by spending the time training and studying how the body works.
Training
After my win in the Longview Half Marathon last autumn, I settled in for what I hoped would be a nice pleasant maintenance period using 80/20 Endurance’s Level 3 Maintenance plan, and I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. A few years ago, I had set a goal of running a 1:20:00 or better half marathon by the time I turn 40 in 2027. When I set the goal, I expected it to be something I could barely pull off on a flat course at sea level… but I demolished that goal at Longview. That got me thinking about new challenges, and I decided I did want to do a marathon.
Unfortunately, that nice pleasant maintenance plan ran into the minor hiccup of a bulging disk. I was doing some basic weight work to try to strengthen especially my core to support my running and cycling, tried a single-leg Romanian dead lift for the first time, and had the classic “threw out my back” experience. On the advice of my PT, I ran through it because it was helping rather than hurting, but it definitely slowed me down a lot over the course of fall and winter. Lots of care, PT, and time eventually got it back to normal, but I came into the spring training season having lost a fair bit of ground.
Even so, I decided to go ahead and use the 80/20 Endurance Level 3 marathon plan. A bold choice, perhaps, given it was my first marathon and I was coming off of an injury, but one I thought was well-justified by my overall level of fitness and the success I had with the Level 3 Run Faster and Half Marathon plans, and that proved correct. I did nearly every workout on the training schedule for the whole season. The only days I missed were when I had an injection to help my back finish resetting and when my PT assigned me a couple days of rest to help reset my sacrum alignment after identifying some piriformis insertion issues.
Sticking with it was a bit tough in spots. This winter and spring were quite snowy and windy. I ended up with icicles on my beard and eyebrows and eyelashes on one April training run! But I did the work anyway, and in fact extended a bunch of the long run workouts beyond what the 80/20 Endurance plan would have given me, because I had the fitness to do it and I thought — correctly, as it turns out — that it would be helpful come race day. I also made a point to do my long runs on pavement so my legs and feet would get used to absorbing that kind of pounding (a tip I got from the very helpful Master the Marathon course from 80/20 Endurance).
One other bit of input from the PT was related to knee issues that seem to be downstream of the piriformis issues which seem themselves to be downstream of the back injury. Net, my right knee developed some relatively mild but quite annoying tendonitis that didn’t bother me while running, but would bother me after running. She put me on a regimen that aimed to minimize impact: trail running, low-impact cross-training, and as few hills as possible (a hard task in Colorado).
For the rest of the season, I mostly ran my hard workouts on trails near us, other than my long runs, which I still did on pavement. Nearly all my foundation and recovery work I did on my bike trainer or my actual bike once it got warm enough (far better than the trainer!). On the one hand, previous experience suggests I might have been a bit faster because a bit more resilient had I been able to do more of that work on my feet. On the other hand, it’s quite possible I would have exacerbated the tendonitis to a point where I couldn’t run. Much better to show up healthy and able to run — even if a little bit slower — than not to be able to show up at all.
There wasn’t much more to it than that: “just” showing up and doing the work from the plan! The “just” there does a lot of work, though: I averaged
Final Prep and Fueling
Throughout the course of the week leading up to the race, I made a point to generally increase my carb intake relative to fats and proteins. I also practiced carb loading for a couple late-season long runs, so that loading heavily coming into this weekend wasn’t new for my body. I made an explicit goal to get at least 70% of my intake from carbs on Thursday and Friday, and to hit both 75% carbs and 7g carbs for every kg of body weight on Saturday, so that I would be well-stocked with glycogen reserves. Lots of bread and fruit and cereals and vegetables and honey and maple syrup and rice and noodles this week!
In the afternoon yesterday, I drove up to Denver to pick up my packet, then hopped over to a friend’s house to stay overnight so I didn’t have to drive back home and then drive up again this morning. We went out and got dinner; I had a salad with leafy greens, tons of fruit, and grilled chicken. Shortly before I bed, I topped the day off with a slice of bread with some preserves on it and about 8 ounces of orange juice. Although I didn’t have a good way to measure dinner, my best guess is that I did successfully hit the target carb load of 7g carbs/kg body weight.
I went to bed last night around 8:45pm. I took 3mg melatonin to help me fall asleep, had a fan running in the room for white noise, and I was solidly asleep by about 9:15pm from what my watch reports. That was good, because I got up at 3am today for the sake of being able to eat a good breakfast long enough before the race started!
I got dressed, put on my shoes (a pair of Endorphin Elites — the originals, not the Elite 2s — that I only bust out for races), and made breakfast: 8 ounces of orange juice, a fried egg, a piece of whole wheat bread with blackberry preserves, two thirds of a cup of Great Grains Raisins, Dates, & Pecans with about a third of a cup of whole milk, and a bottle of Skratch Labs Hydration Mix. Then I sat there and reviewed my pace plans and evaluated how I was feeling and which of them seemed reasonable and doable based on my recent training runs.
I left my friend’s house at 4:25am and got to City Park, where the race starts, right at 4:45, as expected. I sat there and read a bit, reviewed my pace plans one more time, and took a couple Tylenol and an Aleve to preemptively help with the inevitable pain of what was coming. Then: bib on, last bit of hydration, and I started jogging over to the park… only to realize I had left all my gels in the car, and so jogged back, got the gels, and then headed over to the park. Not the last time I would have a gels-related incident!
The Actual Race
The race started at 6am. I spent the interval between leaving my car at 5am and the start doing a really solid warmup, checking my gear at the bag check, and hitting the toilet a couple of times. Then into the corral to wait for the start. The weather was perfect: 48ºF or so, with light cloud cover, so it felt cool but not at all cold, and just staying loose and moving around in the corral was enough to keep my body temperature up.
Fueling
As planned, I took my first gel 15 minutes before the race. So let’s talk gels, with a big caveat: different things work for different people. I landed last year on AMACX’s drink gels, which I find hit the right balance for me. They go down easily, they don’t require washing down immediately afterward the way Gu does, and they don’t have the weird-to-me texture of things like Science In Sport’s Isotonic gels. For the race today, I used a mix of the AMACX Turbo and Drink gels.
My fueling strategy was simple: take a gel every 30 minutes, starting 15 minutes before the start of the race. That was enough to put me on track to consume roughly 8 grams of carbs per mile, or ~80 grams of carbohydrates every hour, which is right in the range that most top-tier athletes are using these days.2
Net, the planned schedule looked like this:
| Time | Gel | Caffeinated | Carbs |
|---|---|---|---|
| −0:15:00 | Cassis Turbo Gel | yes | 40g |
| 0:15:00 | Citrus Turbo Gel | no | 40g |
| 0:45:00 | Strawberry Drink Gel | no | 30g |
| 1:15:00 | Cassis Turbo Gel | yes | 40g |
| 1:45:00 | Raspberry Drink Gel | no | 30g |
| 2:15:00 | Citrus Drink Gel | no | 30g |
I picked that mix mostly for variety and to hit my target carb intake. The Turbo Gels are 40g carbohydrate per gel, and the Drink Gels are 30g carbohydrate per gel, but the Turbo Gels are also a fair bit pricier. It made the most sense to me to use a mix if I could hit my goals that way. This mix did! I started out with a bit more of a “bang” and dropped off a bit at the end because the reality is that the last 30 minutes or so are unlikely to get a significant difference between 30g or 40g of carbs. As for ordering: variety and putting my favorite last.
Right around 2¼ miles into the race, I heard the telling and very annoying sound of a gel hitting the ground and knew immediately what had happened because the same thing had happened to me on a training run back in April. Happily I noticed: I would have been sad to be out a gel, especially because I was committed to nailing my fueling plan. I doubled back and picked it up, and lost a solid 10 seconds to it, alas.3 The rest of the race, I made sure that the gels were situated more solidly in the liner pockets of my shorts, and that the outer layer of my shorts was covering them so they wouldn’t slip out. Thankfully, that was the last such mishap, and I stuck pretty exactly to my fueling schedule, plus or minus a minute or two.
I also grabbed some of the available Gatorade Endurance Formula or some water at every single station, and drank to thirst but no more. That approach served me well: I never felt dehydrated, but I also never felt over-hydrated. Feeling like you need to stop to urinate is a terrible distraction. Other than a tiny bit of gut discomfort around mile 20 that quickly subsided, I had zero issues from fueling or hydration, which was a big win.
Pacing
Pacing-wise, I went out by feel and aimed to keep the first 10 miles extremely comfortable. One small challenge I did not expect here was that the marathon also has a marathon relay that starts at the same time and follows the same course — so the front-runners at the start were mostly a bunch of people running only 6.5 miles, not 26.2! Happily, I realized that before starting and adjusted for it mentally: even more “run your own race” than usual.
The other small challenge I had was technological in nature. I usually try to look occasionally at my heart rate during a race as a sanity check, but in this case my chest strap was giving odd data off and on through the first long stretch of the race, before finally settling down after mile 11, as you can see in this screenshot from Strava:
As a result, I had to rely almost purely on feel. Gladly, that’s something I have been consciously practicing. In fact, for a while in the early middle of the race, I fell into a game I do regularly on training runs: guessing the time for each automatic lap split before looking at my watch. Net, even though my heart rate data wasn’t particularly useful, it also didn’t particularly matter. That was a win in its own right.
I went out moving a touch faster than I had initially planned, but only by a little, and in a way that felt really good. More than that, it felt like it matched up with the advice I had gotten going into the race. A fellow runner with many marathons under her belt had noted that the first ten miles should feel so easy that it seems too easy; and they did. One of my uncles is also a very accomplished endurance athlete and described a marathon to me as “ten miles of cruising, ten miles of starting to dig, and ten kilometers of guts”, and that also tracked exactly with how the race felt.
Following that guidance, I was having a blast up through about mile 18, with some slow-growing fatigue but nothing that was generating much resistance. When, at mile 16, I ran past a friend who had come out to cheer me on, I was shouting jokes back and forth with him. Right about mile 18, my legs finally started let me know that I had done a lot of work. It felt right, though — not so much fatigue that I was slowed by it, but enough that I had to really start digging in to keep holding my pace.
And so I did! The final 10km of the race has a pretty good mix of descent and ascent after a long climb in miles
The most dangerous moment in the race came at the point when, in that mix of descent and ascent, I was coming down onto Cherry Creek trail for a stretch along the creek. I missed a step, half-slammed into a railing, and nearly fell before catching myself with the rail, getting my footing back, and continuing on without every stopping. (To whoever the gal doing the marathon relay was who saw me almost fall, sympathized, and then encouraged me with a “let’s run together, 5 miles is a long way to go”: thank you! The kindness was motivating!)
The most challenging part of the race physically came in mile
I judged that this would probably sort itself out. I also decided that, given where I was in the race, I was going to run through it unless and until I couldn’t. Gladly, after about a half mile, it just stopped. That judgment was another win from doing the training really diligently this season. I had a few similar experiences (albeit quite different in the details) on long runs, so I knew that a lot of times, those things sort themselves out on their own if you just keep running.
Having spent the day reflecting on the race and looking at my pacing, I don’t think I could have paced this much better than I did. Perhaps going out a second or two slower per mile would have given me a tiny bit more juice at the end, but when all was said and done I was running the same kinds of paces at the end of the race as I was at the start. They just hurt. That’s how it is supposed to be, though, and as much as I was hurting on those last few miles, I held the pace. That was profoundly satisfying, not least because I spent a bunch of time this season practicing working hard through fatigue.
Conclusion
I am happy as can be with this outcome. I couldn’t ask for a better first marathon experience: achieving all my goals and enjoying it immensely along the way. As I said at the start, there is something enormously rewarding about this kind of training. I am, more than I could have imagined a few years ago, deeply in tune with what my body can do, and my body can do far more than I knew it could. Those final miles were hard, but in a weird way the race was easier than I thought it would be, because I was well-prepared for it. Marathoning is an experience I fully expect to repeat. After all: Boston is coming next spring, and it looks like I will qualify for entry. Who would pass that up? Not me, I think!
Notes
Presumably, anyway: the official qualifying time for men my age is 3:00:00, and even accounting for the adjustment they make to keep the field size reasonable based on how many people hit that, it would have to be a massive adjustment to eat up over 11 minutes. Previous such adjustments have been in the
5 – 6 -minute range. ↩︎Some athletes are aiming even higher, but
70 – 90 g/hour is a pretty common recommendation. ↩︎I would have been fine: I could have just snagged one of the Honey Stinger gels available on course, but I didn’t want to lose a gel and I didn’t want to leave it there for someone else to slip or trip on. I sure would have loved to get those 10 seconds back and have the time be 2:48:29 instead, though! ↩︎