Assumed audience: Folks who like reading about endurance sports and training.
Back at the end of September, I ran the Boulderthon Marathon as my fall goal race — my third consecutive year participating somehow in the Boulderthon event. As always, the numbers up front:
- Official time: 2:53:36 (6:37/mile)
- Place:
- 5/2,588 overall
- 5/1,742 among men
- 1/202 among men
35 – 39
Yep, you’re reading that right: I won my age group and placed 5th overall! I also ran it a fair bit slower than I had hoped going into the season.
Training
The main interesting change this season from previous seasons was nutrition: I have been using Fuelin for nutrition tracking and “coaching” since early summer. Readers of previous write-ups may recall my appreciation for Foodnoms. I still like Foodnoms better as a tracking app, but it doesn’t have the endurance athlete-specific guidance that Fuelin does. I have an open and repeated request to the Fuelin team that they improve their integration with Apple Health so that I can use Fuelin for the guidance, which I find quite helpful, while using Foodnoms for logging, which I find much preferable. In addition to the sport-focused guidance, Fuelin’s LLM-powered food suggestions were a great boon, especially on carb-loading days and while traveling.
I don’t know that I’ll keep Fuelin long-term. It has been helpful so far, but for something like this, the goal is always self-mastery through knowledge of one’s own body as well as the knowledge to support that self-mastery. Fuelin has been a nice help on the path, though.
I used the 80/20 Endurance Norwegian Training Marathon Level 3 plan… with some meaningful modifications. Where in previous seasons I have stuck pretty closely to what the plans prescribed, here I wanted to do a hybrid approach, blending the plan with more active self-coaching. I reviewed the training plan here. As I noted there:
Running in Zone 1 instead of Zone 2 on the foundation/easy days and cutting off 45 minutes of programmed run time at the peak of the build amounted to at least 8 fewer miles per week than the regular 80/20 plan. I ran
100 – 150 fewer miles over the course of this build than I would have using one of the “regular” plans. That’s a lot less mileage!Late in the season, I also realized that the Zone 1 work simply wasn’t building my fitness as effectively as Zone 2 work has. Given that I have tolerated that Zone 2 work extremely well while running higher volume, I concluded that I needed to either significantly bump up the volume of the “load”/workout days or bump up from Zone 1 to Zone 2 on the foundation/easy days. I opted for the latter: for the last 4 weeks of the build, I started adding in more Zone 2 work again. I immediately started seeing the fitness response I expected on the other runs in the week, especially my long runs.
Based on previous years and how the last month of training went, I suspect I could well have taken a minute or more off my final time had I been doing the kind of work I have done previously.
In addition to the plan not working quite right for me, I had a couple minor hitches along the way:
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One day in mid-August, I did a run too soon after Pilates and then caught my foot in my shorts as I hurriedly stripped them off on my way to the shower before work meetings. The combination of extra fatigue plus a jerky motion caused my back to seize up a bit. Happily, it was only just a bit: I was able to rest it for a couple of days, then ease back in, and within a week, I felt back to normal. That is, in its own way, huge progress.
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In mid-September, my left outer calf started complaining after a few too many runs in the sandy mess left on one of the trails I’d been frequenting and a couple almost-rolled-ankles. It bugged me through the next week before finally settling down just 10 days before the race.
Neither of these helped my cause, of course, but happily neither ended up being a particularly big deal, either.
As suggested by the first of those hitches, I was doing Pilates consistently throughout the season. I hit a Reformer Pilates class most weeks, and did basic mat work at home several evenings a week as well. I strongly recommend Pilates or yoga for endurance athletes! Core stability and strength is incredibly important. That goes double if, like me, you have a congenitally weak back (it runs in the family). Despite the way it contributed to the minor back regression, I’m pretty confident that it is also why that was the only regression I had and also part of why I was able to recover so swiftly.
I also tried adding in some strength work mid-season. It was a good idea but badly timed. I ended up over-fatigued and backed off. I’m adding it back in now during my off-season, with the goal that I can handle it well while training.
The race
The day before the race, I drove up to Boulder and picked up my packet. Then I had dinner at Abrusci’s Fire and Vine. High carbs, low fat and protein, with a nice bit of guidance from Fuelin on what to order: it worked perfectly for that. Highly recommend, would eat there again — on a race day or otherwise! I stayed at the same friend’s house I usually do for races in Denver or Boulder (thanks, Eric and Lauren!) and did my usual morning prep there. With a 7am start, I only had to get up at 4am. The usual breakfast: a fried egg, some toast and jam, and some Skratch Labs Sport Hydration Mix.
I got to Boulder early enough to nap for twenty minutes or so. I’ve only managed that before a race once before, well over a decade ago. It was a lot better than sitting there with nerves and nothing to do. Then I went down, hit the bathroom, checked my bag, and warmed up. A funny thing, warming up for a marathon, given it means you’re running even further than a distance most normal people already think is crazy. It’s helpful, though, if you are trained well enough that you will be racing it.
I knew going in that the weather was going to make for an interesting day. The forecast was for it to start in the low 50’s and climb into the low 70’s. That turned out to be pretty accurate. The weather was amazing at the start, but in a way that made it obvious that it would be painfully warm later, and so it was. By late in the race, I was passing runners who were flagging terribly and in at least one case vomiting due to heat. The upper 60’s doesn’t necessarily sound that hot, but combined with altitude and in direct sun, it can be brutal. I hydrated at every aid station along the way: one every two miles. The course was supplied with Precision Fuel’s gels and hydration drink, and while I love the former, I don’t think the latter really does the trick very well in terms of electrolyte load, particularly for a warm day. It also has a weird bite to it that I don’t love, but I drank it anyway. Starting at the 8-mile mark I also started pouring water on my head at every station to stay cool. Even so, by mile 20, I could tell the heat was starting to get to me.
This year’s course was also a bit… interesting. It starts out on a steady descent on paved roads, transitions into some mild rolling hills that head out into dirt roads northeast of Boulder, cuts onto gravel trail along the Boulder Reservoir dam, and then climbs back into Boulder on a mix of road and bike path. The Boulderthon FAQ still has this claim:
Boulderthon courses are 98% on paved roads and paved multi-use paths. There is a very small packed gravel section of the course.
This is simply false, and appears to date to 2024 along with several other bits of outdated information on that page. The course is actually about 80% paved road, 15% dirt road, and 5% wide gravel trail. None of that is a problem in and of itself, but it makes for weird tradeoffs in terms of shoe choice. Fast road shoes — in my case, a pair of the original Endorphin Elites tied on for their last race outing before retiring to the track day stable — don’t necessarily play great on dirt roads, and they play outright poorly on gravel trail. On the other hand, the kinds of shoes I have that would have played well on those dirt and especially gravel trail sections would have been a lot slower on the road. Still: had I realized, I probably would have gone that way and been better for it. My legs came out of the gravel trail section feeling quite beat up, and the top of my right foot was actively aggravated from some weird steps I took on rough rocks with insufficient support.
The course is not especially hilly, but the placement of the hills is mildly annoying: it’s hard not to go out too fast on that early descent (which I did, despite holding myself back), and easy to end up slowing a lot through the climbs, however small they may be, in the last few miles (which I also did, despite holding on as hard as I could). The course is also a very weird mix of suburbia and wide open skies: not a bad mix per se, but not a particularly coherent mix, either.
The much more annoying bit is the way the marathon and half marathon courses split and then merge. I don’t object to this in principle, if the race handles it well. Unfortunately, Boulderthon does not handle it very well. A reasonably fast marathoner like me ends up running through a crowd of very slow half marathoners — folks moving less than half as fast, by definition. (If I pass someone in my mile 24 and their mile 11…) Now: I think those very slow half marathon runners are quite admirable and many of them are doing something much harder for them than a marathon is for me! But it is not fun trying to run hard in miles
All of those factors together meant my pace slacked off by about 45 seconds per mile for miles
For all the reasons outlined above, I don’t expect to run Boulderthon again. For all the race has aspirations to being a big, successful marathon, I don’t think the organizers have figured out how to do what it will take to get there. The trappings are not enough: the race itself has to be a good experience. Particularly given that it’s at a mile above sea level and therefore no one’s best shot at a PR, I also think they just need to embrace the terrain and let it be truly hilly and maybe even go all (or mostly) in on dirt roads and gravel. The beautiful open spaces right by the mountains are a huge part of what makes Boulder a great place for so many people to live and train.
It’s strange, in any case, that there is still no truly top-notch marathon in Colorado. Many world-class athletes live here. Colfax is fine, Boulderthon is fine, and the Colorado Springs Marathon is fine… but none of them are great.
My finish was a solid 5 minutes slower than my marathon debut at Colfax 2025, so at this point I have run each successive marathon slower than the previous… though adjusted for altitude and conditions, my Boston 2026 performance was definitely a lot slower than this was.
Given how much rebuilding this year involved, I’m proud of this outcome even if it wasn’t as fun or satisfying as a full-on PR would have been. Sometimes the win is just getting back to strength and health well enough to be in spitting distance of a previous performance, though. I know, too, that some day in the next decade, I won’t even be able to see this kind of pace again at all: age comes for us all. So I’m grateful I was able to make it to the start line, and that I was able to make it to the finish line with a really respectable finish and a great placing.
Since finishing, I’ve (mostly) just been relaxing and doing whatever I felt like. Up next: maybe a Turkey Trot 5K, and a lot of just working on speed. Next year: a lot of maybes — maybe the Colorado Marathon in the spring, maybe the Courage Classic in the summer, and maybe Chicago in the fall. We will see!
A bonus — what kind of route would make me interested in this? Something more like this:
No one would be under any illusions about it being a fast course or a traditional road race. But it would be a much more Boulder race.