From Roger Bannister to Long John Silver

The alarm on my cell phone rang out at 4am on Saturday. It was 3 hours to race time: The SunTrust National Marathon, running through the streets of Washington DC. I had decided that the Marathon was definitely out for me, so I’d signed up to run the 1/2. I had a goal for this race, I wanted this to be my first sub 2 hour race. My first 2 1/2 marathons had given me times of ~2h 3m, and my split time during the Marine Corps Marathon last year was 2h 1m, so I knew that I could do it.

Training had been a mixed bag, I had completed a 10 mile run 2 weeks earlier in a time of 84.5 minutes, but had also pulled my calf. Since then I’d avoided running. Would my calf hold up? I’d had no knee pain while running for months, had the glucosamine chondroitin I’d been taking worked and repaired my troublesome joints?

Just after 6am the metro train deposited me at the RFK Stadium / Armory station, with a short walk to the start of the race. It was cold, in England we’d call it brass monkey weather, but still I took off my tracksuit and handed it in to the baggage check area while I tried to warm up.

After the formalities (national anthem, address by the mayor, etc), they started the wheelchair race. Unfortunately the sole registrant for this portion of the program failed to appear… not necessarily an auspicious start. I maneuvered myself over to the 3:40 pace group, figuring that I’d stay with them until ~10 miles, then I’d ease up and coast to the finish at about 1h 55m.

…and we were off. The 3:40 pace group was supposed to stick to a pace of 8:23 per mile. We reached the 4 mile marker at exactly 32 minutes, almost 2 minutes ahead of pace (at one point we caught up to the 3:30 pace group). It was then that I started to feel a twinge from my left knee. Listening to that twinge I decided to ease off a bit and let the 3:40 group zoom off into the distance. Between miles 5 & 6 I found myself running next to the mayor of DC - Adrian Fenty. He was running the full marathon, and once we went through the Dupont Circle underpass he started to pull away.

My first pre-race goal was to hit the 7 mile marker at an hour. I’d done that in both of the other 1/2 marathon’s I’d run, and knew that I needed to do that in order to hit the sub 2 hour goal. I passed the marker at 1h 2s, pretty close. Next I wanted to hit the 10 mile marker in less than 90 minutes. I crossed that line in 89 minutes. All I had to do was complete the last 5k in less than 31 minutes, in other words do better than a 10 minute mile for the rest of the race, easily something that I could do.

…unless the calf muscle started to ache once more, which it did at about 10-1/2 miles. In order to protect it, I changed my running gait. This caused my left knee to complain rather loudly. After a further 1/10 of a mile, I could no longer bend my knee while running. so I alternated between walking and running on my right leg while hopping on my left as though it were made of wood. All I needed was a parrot on my shoulder to complete the look…

At the 11 mile marker I still had a shot, I just needed 2 sub 9 minute miles, but my knee stubbornly refused to co-operate. The last 2 miles ended up taking me 12 minutes each, and I finished with my slowest 1/2 marathon time of 2h 6m 28s.

I’m not disappointed though, as far as I’m concerned I did fantastically. I know that, given the physical challenges, I couldn’t have done better. At no point did I consider just giving up, after all, I had to get back to the baggage check to get my tracksuit back anyway.

Ok, and now for my final total for the contest. I had said when I started this contest that I wanted to lose 10 lbs. I began at 218, and my weigh in after the race was 208.4, so I did it. I could probably have done better had I not injured my calf, etc, but that’s life, and there was no way that I was going to get anywhere close to challenging Scottie or David (congrats to both of them, and to all other participants that lost weight).

Let’s make my final word on this contest be a thank you to Donna for setting it up, and to those people and companies that donated prize money.