PREPARATION
This was my fourth marathon, and I worked much harder to prepare for it than any previous race. Last January, I restarted my regular training program, slowly building up my weekly mileage during the spring. In April I started marathon training in earnest, following a formal schedule from Daniels' Running Formula for the next six months leading up to the race. My training stats for that period were:
64.2 mi/week (9.2 mi/day, 1413 miles total)
75 mi high week, 51 mile low week
8 runs of 20+ miles
22 weeks total (25 weeks including the 3 week taper before the race)
This was about 30% more than I did before the Austin Marathon in 2003, my previous best race. With this preparation, I was ready to attack 3:10.
CARBO-LOADING
Two days before the race, I began a carbo-loading program that was a little comical. The idea was that by eating very high amounts of carbohydrate in the days before the race, I could super-saturate my muscle cells with stored glucose, enabling me to go farther and faster on race day before hitting the limits of exhaustion.
My scientifically determined carbo goal was 10 grams per kilogram of body mass per day. For me that worked out to roughly 640g per day. Let me tell you, that is a LOT of carbs! Eating that much was a challenge, made all the more amusing in that my eating habits essentially became the polar opposite of the Atkins diet. I ate high glycemic index carbs to the exclusion of almost all other foods. Bagels and fruit juices became my best friend. On the Friday before the marathon, I ate:
6 orange juices, 4 grape juices, 4 gatorades, 3 bagels, 3 slices bread, 2 servings eggplant ricotta, 2 apples, 1 banana, 1 green salad, 1 bag pretzels, 1 bag of candy corn, and also 1 coffee and 1 tea (no carbs). The total was about 700g carbs and about 3000 calories. Yum!
RACE DAY
Before the race, the weather forecast looked miserable. For the 8AM starting time, the prediction was for temperatures in the low 30s with cloudy skies and medium winds. Brrrrr! I'd originally prepared to run in just shorts and a singlet, but the weather prompted me to change my race day outfit. I ended up running in three layers of clothes: a nylon T-shirt, covered by a long-sleeve fleece shirt, covered by a long-sleeve cotton shirt. I also added gloves and a ski hat. It was a little bulky, but workable.
Fortunately race morning dawned a bit nicer than predicted. It was a cold 36 degrees, but the air was calm and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds from time to time. With my extra layers, it wasn't bad at all. As the start time approached, I queued up behind the starting line with thousands of other runners, on a bridge over the Des Moines River facing the Iowa state capitol building's golden dome. With a minute to go, I scanned the faces of the other runners, looking for signs of the panicky feeling that gripped me. After what seemed like an eternity of training and preparation, the race had finally arrived. There was nothing left to do but run, taking all the energy I'd painstakingly accumulated over six months and spending it in one 3 hour burst.
THE COURSE
At the start, we tore off up the hill towards the capitol building gleaming in the early morning sun. Compared to most other races I've done, it was a beautiful route to run. In fact, I give the Des Moines Marathon very high marks for attractiveness of the course. Most of the route was in interesting parts of downtown, handsome old residential neighborhoods outside the city center, or beautiful trails and parks among gorgeous forests bursting with autumn colors. The people were great too. Almost everywhere on the route, there were enthusiastic crowds of people to cheer on the runners. Unlike so many other races, the citizens of Des Moines seem to really appreciate their home town race, and want to make sure their running guests feel at home. Aid stations and traffic control along the race route were also well done. It appeared to have the makings of a great marathon course.
Unfortunately, a number of aspects of the course weren't so great. The biggest surprise to me was the hilliness of the first 11 miles. This was the midwest, and I had stupidly assumed the course to be pancake flat. I should have remember that Des Moines is French for "hills". In all honesty the hills weren't huge or especially difficult, but there were a lot of them and they definitely slowed me down a bit in the first half of the race.
Blame me for not expecting hills, but some other problems with the course really need to be improved by the race organizers. One issue is that the half marathon and full marathon covered the same route at the same time. The half marathon ended up being only 13 miles instead of 26 by using shortcuts at a few key points along the route. This meant that every time the marathoners came to the exit of one of these shortcuts, they had to merge in with a crowd of half-marathoners who were running a significantly slower pace, and it was sometimes difficult to maneuver around them without slowing to their pace. This was especially true in the latter stages of the race, when everyone was already exhausted and semi-delirious.
By far the biggest problem with the race was the mile markers. I'm fairly certain that the course as a whole was the correct length, but the position of every mile marker along the route was suspect. Especially during the second half of the course, nearly all the mile markers were wildly misplaced or missing entirely. A little bit of error in the placement of the markers is understandable, but according to my shoe-mounted distance monitor, the markers in the second half were each randomly displaced by several tenths of a mile, and in one case by fully half a mile. I believe the critical half-marathon marker was also misplaced, creating a course that was about 12.8 miles in the first half and 13.4 in the second half. While none of this directly affected anyone's race time, it made it virtually impossible for runners to estimate their current pace, or know where they were relative to their finish time goals. It was extremely frustrating to say the least.
The capper was the clock at the finish line. It was one of those giant digital clocks stretched directly above the finish line, showing each runner's finishing time. You'd think this would be something important to get accurate, but the finish line clock was actually way off! It showed a time about 2 minutes slower than the true gun time for everyone as they finished. I can maybe imagine how something like that could get messed up temporarily, but how the problem could have gone unnoticed and continued to show the wrong time for thousands of runners as they finished is beyond me. Fortunately the official results on the race web site recorded the true finish time, not the time on the broken clock.
THE RACE
The race started well for me. My original plan was to run the first few miles a bit slower than my 7:15/mile goal pace, then speed up. The hills threw all that off, though. If the mile markers were accurate, my first 5 mile splits were 7:02, 7:11, 7:11, 7:45, 7:18. But according to my distance monitor, the mile times were 8:01, 7:12, 7:12, 7:39, 7:28. I felt good through the early miles. I shed my outer layer shirt at mile 3, and a bit later I tossed the hat. I kept the fleece and gloves for the remainder of the race.
Around mile 11, I finished the hilly section, and entered a bike path through a park along the river. It was slightly downhill, and I purposefully backed off a bit to make sure I didn't go too fast too early. The crazy mile markers were a nuisance, but I thought I was slightly ahead of my goal pace to hit 3:10. At mile 13, I caught the first sight of my family who'd come to cheer, and I was feeling a bit strained but basically good. My split times were all at or below goal pace. I crossed the half-marathon marker in 1:34:49, just a hair better than 3:10 pace. Given that the second half was flatter and easier than the first, I thought I had a good shot at reaching my goal. Unfortunately I now believe that the half-marathon marker was misplaced, and my true time for the first half was about 1:37, behind goal pace.
The next 7 miles were a struggle for me. Just as I was starting to feel the beginnings of exhaustion, the mile markers went crazy. My splits for miles 14-16 were all around 8:00/mile, but that didn't seem to fit with my self-assessment of how fast I was moving. Based on later review of my distance monitor data, I believe I kept about a 7:11/mile pace through this whole section, but it was difficult. The crowd had thinned out, and there was nobody running immediately nearby me. There were two people about 50 feet ahead, and for two miles I strained to catch up with them. It was just a short gap, and it seemed to take me forever to close it, but finally I caught them and ran with them for a few miles more. I saw my family once more in this section, and waved a tired wave.
About mile 20, the mile markers became totally useless. In fact, my mile 19 split was 11:08! I just gave up on the mile markers, and tried to gauge my pace off of the runners around me and my own sense of speed. I really didn't know if I still had a chance at 3:10, but there was nothing I could do.
Near the end of the course was a tedious section where we ran up and down the same 1-mile section of industrial road three times. As I'd feared, this was a real killer mentally, since it seemed like we were going nowhere. I saw my family a few more times, but could barely manage a wave. I wondered vaguely what my time was and how I would finish, but it was just mild curiosity, like viewing someone else's race. I was too tired to care more, and I only wanted to finish and be done. I struggled to keep about a 7:50/mile pace.
Exiting the triple out-and-back for the last 1.2 miles of the course, I tried to push with what little energy I had left. By that point I knew 3:10:59 was out of the question, but I hoped 3:15:59 might still be possible. At last I passed the 26th mile marker, and the finish loomed into sight. At mile 26 my time was 3:14:59, and I had exactly 60 seconds to cover the final tenths of a mile to the finish. I dropped down to about a 6:30/mile pace, which was as much of a sprint as I could manage, and prayed for the best. My prayers were answered as I finally staggered across the finish line at 3:15:55. That works out to 7:28/mile pace for 26.2 miles. Whew!
RESULTS
In the end, I missed my goal of 3:10 and didn't qualify for next spring's Boston Marathon. That 3:15:59 number still held significance for me, though. Due to the quirks of the Boston qualifying rules, I can also use this race to qualify for Boston 2006, using the 3:15:59 qualifying standard for men 35-39, since that's how old I'll be in April 2006. With my finish time, I snuck under the line by a mere 4 seconds. So now I have to wait 18 months, but I will get to run the Boston Marathon.
The other stats are pretty encouraging. I finished 80th overall, out of 1233 who ran the marathon. I set a new personal best for the marathon distance, beating my old record by over seven minutes. By a non-linear effort measure that accounts for both time and distance, this was also my best race of any length. I ran a solid even-effort race, avoided any big crash in the final miles, and overall ran about the best race I think I could have hoped to under the circumstances.
If you like stats, here are two graphs of my pace and heart rate during the race. The graphs show a vertical line at every mile marker, which wasn't necessarily actually a mile. There were also several missing markers, so the graph is missing the split lines for miles 2, 12, 15, 22, and 24.
My heart rate was fairly steady from start to finish, and averaged about 175 beats/minute. My pace was also fairly steady. My slowest mile was 8:01 uphill at the start, and my fastest was 6:59 during a long downhill stretch.
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