It has been said, by wiser men then myself, that running is a
mental sport, to this I ad my humble amen. While I admit I am quite upset that I
did not do as well as I wanted, over all this marathon was good experience. I
have taken the last four days to recover, and to put my thoughts together, and I
thought I would wrap up this training marathon, with what the lessons I learned.
As I mentioned the day of the race, I finished with a final time of
4:28:46. Placing 3566 of some 26000 participants. I cant really feel to bad
about this. My dream time was 3:30:00, over the last few months I had realized
that I was probably being a bit optimistic, and that 3:45:00 was a better goal.
As it turns out I was right, but like most first time marathoners kept shooting
for the faster time. This would have been bad enough. But come race day I
actually ran the first half of the marathon at almost a minute a mile faster
then even my 3:30 pace. This was my first and largest Mistake. At one point I
was over a half mile ahead of ware I should have been.
I say that running out to fast was my Biggest mistake. Lets take a look
at the mistakes and the lessons learned.
1) I ran the first 12 miles at a average of 7:30, this was 30 seconds
under my planed pace. I say average, because I topped out at 6:45. This was a
huge mistake. Any experienced marathon runner will tell you that a marathon is
all about being able to control your pace. This is the Mental sport that I
referred to above, and this is were I failed. Because of this by the second half
of the run I was lucky to keep my pace above 11:00, my muscles were simply to
fatigued.
2) I managed to train to hard and and not hard enough at the same time. I
spent the last 16 weeks on a very rigorous schedule. At several points during
this program I realized that I was setting my sites to high. But because I was
finishing all my runs I kept going. The result was I did improve my speed quite
a bit, but I never really got my endurance up to were it needed to be.
3) I set my goals to high. This should have been obvious to me from the
start. But Being a noob to running I did not see it. To put things in
perspective, I checked the official result. If I had ran at 3:30 I would have
finished 430th out of 26000. Even in the height of my optimism, I never thought
I would place that high. I think now that even if I had controlled my pace, and
stayed at 8:00 I would not have been able to hit 3:30. I most likely would have
just hit the wall 6 or 8 miles further down the road. I am however quite sure
that had I set my goal for 3:55, a 9:00 pace. I would have been fine. This is
something I will be finding out soon enough.
4) I was was to stressed out, I could not sleep the two days before the
race. This was mostly because I knew at some level that I was shooting for to
fast a time. I also knew that I was going to make mistakes. Unfortunately as
always this contributed to me making them.
Now when it comes to lessons learned I can some up much more quickly.
1) Find a realistic pace, and stick to it. (I knew this already, but now
it is burned in my brain)
2) The first half of a marathon is the first 20miles, and the second half
is the last 6. No matter how slow or fast you run, the last six miles are always
hard.
3) No matter how hard you train, or how much you study, you are never
ready for your first marathon.
4) Running a marathon is not about speed, its how far you can go before
fatigue stops you. Building speed is good, but building endurance is what gets
you over the the finish line.
5) Running is a mental sport, not a physical one. Discipline is the most
important ingredient marathon running.
I am sure most experienced runners out there will read this and say, DA,
but I am still less then a year into running, and we noobies sometime have
to learn things the hard way. Some ware around mile 16 of the 2007 LA
marathon I was about ready to give up running forever. Now 4 days later I have
already planned out my two months of training. Culminating in the
Cincinnati Marathon, on May 6th.
I am taking my own advice and setting my goals much more realistically, but
that's another blog.
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