Dallas Marathon take 2

First let me start by sharing that all four of us got PRs in Dallas!  Holla!  Matt was 30 minutes faster, Tag was 12 minutes faster, Jake was 7 minutes faster, and I beat my previous best by a bit over 3 minutes.  Fantastic.  It was nice for 4 dudes from Iowa to roll into Texas and set personal marks.  


With that said, no one got their goal for the day - too bad.

Jake and Matt ran most of the race together.  Jake missed his goal by a measly 4 seconds - I will tell you that he has handled this near miss with maturity well beyond his years.  Great job Jake!  Soon 3:10:00 will be a distant memory and you will be rolling sub-3.  Guaranteed.  


Matt was a machine and rocked out a 3:13:00 using the 10-mile-a-week plan.  He had an amazing result - imagine what will happen for his third marathon?


Tag continues to get faster setting PRs every time he lines up to race.  Like many of us, Tag got caught on the final hills but was able to push through them and finish strong.


And then there is me   (I know, we finally get to talk about someone interesting) - anywho,  my plan coming into this race was to get below 2:55:00.  In the weeks leading up to the race I began to lose my confidence in my ability to get it done.  I don't think I had a single good run in the last three weeks of training.  I hate the taper - it doesn't work well for me.

By race morning those pesky voices in my head were already up and at it.  "C'mon Chris, you don't really think you can do it?" "just go for a PR, fight for 2:55:00 another day"...


Even though I wasn't brimming with confidence, I decided to go for it anyway.  


The start was really fast - or that's how I ran it anyway.


Miles 6-9 were uphill.  Nothing too steep or crazy, but they did a good job of keeping the pace in check.  Mile 11 was all downhill and very fast.  Mile 11 was my fastest and was the only mile below 6:30 okay, just barely - 6:29.


By the halfway point I was ahead of pace coming in at 1:26:34, about a minute ahead of goal. This was not necessarily the best plan for me.  I was averaging 6:36 pace which made me nervous.  Odds were that I couldn't hold that pace...boo.


I decided to keep pushing and see what happened.  The front side of the lake was into the wind - the wind wasn't too bad - maybe 12 mph.  I was able to stick with a group of 5 guys and we shared the duties pulling in the wind.  Not sure if my 5'9" helped the others when I was out front.


On the back side of the lake the wind was at our back and our group started to string out. I hung on as long as I could.  By mile 20 I was fading a bit - but I still had 6:38 pace with 10K to go.  No problem, right?


Problem is, we had to go back up the hills that we went down at mile 11.  Miles 20-22.5 were all uphill.  Again it wasn't brutally steep but they came at a bad time both mentally and physically.  My slowest mile was mile 21 at 7:14.  I tried to get my pace back after 21 but I couldn't get the legs back quickly enough.  I went negative splits 21-26 but they just weren't negative enough.  My last 5K was sub 6:50 pace - too little too late.  There was no one around until 1.5 miles to go when we reconnected with the half marathon folks.

Team Dallas - "We Run This Town"

Side note - I really enjoyed the half marathon people running 9 wide, talking on cellular telephones, stopping for no reason right in front of me, wearing their stupid 5 fingered shoes, and making me weave through them like Barry Sanders.  It wasn't that bad, the timing was bad though.  Tired legs + tired mind + lack of self awareness half marathoners = crabby Chris.  


The finish was odd.  It wasn't well marked but it came sooner than I thought it would.  And as you probably guessed by now (or because you already saw my results) I finished 93 seconds off of my goal.

"Just Shy" again

2:56:32 - a new PR and 49th overall.  In the spirit of "just shy", I missed being the top Iowa finisher by 9 seconds, I missed top 10 in my age group (good enough for an award) by one spot, and I missed beating Wisham's mark for 2010 by 61 seconds.


It's all good.  Now I know 2:54:59 is possible for me...


I had great time and a great weekend.  Tag, Matt, Jake and I spent 4 days together without altercations.  Thanks to my sister Teresa for being an amazing hostess!