Boston Marathon – The Race! – Part 2

So everyone else is all like, here’s my race report from last weekend, and here I am, crap, I still haven’t finished my Boston race report!?!! It’s been half written for weeks, so here goes! I’m not going to do my typical race report with splits, and details like that.  I had no real pace/time goals, so the splits don’t matter.

Boston Marathon Week Part 1

I’ve been back for a week, and still have not written my recap… life has been crazy busy, but I need to get this done before my memory fades!  Luckily I took about 1,000,537 photos, so that should help.  I’m planning to break this into two posts, one as a summary/recap of all the not-the-marathon stuff that we did, and a marathon recap.  First up, the not-the-marathon!

Lost Soul Recon Mission

My major goal race of the fall is the Lost Soul Ultra 100k in Lethbridge.  I’ve heard so many good things about this race, and back in the winter when I registered for the race I really had no clue what I was getting myself into.  Over the last few months I’ve had a ton of advice, and descriptions of the course, everything from “It’s crazy hilly, train on steep hills and be ready to climb and descend”, to “It’s almost too runnable, be used to running trail”.  It was very obvious that I needed to see this course for myself and get some time on it.  

Surfers Point Marathon; the marathon I didn’t train for.

I ran a marathon this past weekend that I didn’t train for.  Ok, YES, I know, I’ve been running  a crap-ton all summer.  So you’re probably wondering, how could this be defined as NOT training.  Yes, I’ve been training, I trained all summer for the Grizzly 50k, but I did not train for this marathon.  Same thing/close enough/ etc?  Right?  Perhaps, and I wondered going in if the two might be close enough.  After all, I’ve been working my tail off to get in pretty good shape this summer, and I think I AM in pretty good shape, in many ways, the best shape of my life.  So I thought an experiment was in order, I ran my PB (Personal-Best) marathon last fall, after training really hard for that marathon, and doing all the typical runs and volume building that a typical marathon training plan has in it.  I ended up having the flu on race day, I woke up with a fever, popped some drugs and ran the race anyway.  I felt pretty horrible during the race, but I survived, and ended with a pretty damn good time, one that I would have been happy with on a healthy day.  So this fall after the Grizzly 50k, I wondered to myself, could I run a marathon as fast, could I run faster?  I feel stronger, I know I’m stronger, but how will that translate in a race?  So what better to do than to put myself to the test, right? Right… (Note: it was a very painful test, next time I’m finding someone else to actually RUN the test 😉 )

Windermere Marathon Race Report aka Running on the Surface of the Sun…

As I posted in my last post, going into the race the forecast was HOT.  We knew this going in, and perhaps should have adjusted our goals, but both Lori and I were really hoping that she could still BQ, and really had no idea how the heat would affect either of us.