Sometimes it's just not meant to be...and the reason for it, well, I'll probably never really know.
The training went well. All the online materials/calculators had me projected to be in shape for running a marathon much faster than I had intended to attempt. I used a hybrid approach, where I combined Hal Higdon with a little bit of Hansons' and a lot of "listen to your body". My predictor run on a hilly course had me coming through the half marathon at 6:54 pace. If I could just slow it down by about 30 seconds per mile, I'd have that BQ in the bag.
That didn't happen on December 19th. At 3:15:59 (my intended running time), I was just across mile 25....and in a world of hurt.
Mile 1 I was on the 3:15 pacer, until I realized we were at 7:08 instead of 7:28 like he said we were going to be at....no biggie, I can give the running gods some of those stolen seconds back over the course of the next few miles. Get to the next mile, probably 10 seconds too fast, Mile 3 same thing, then I purposely slow down and make sure I'm going to get through this marathon like I had trained to do. Eventually things thinned out and there was a group of us working together, talking about where we were from, the weather (very cold for Jacksonville on race day, perfect for the average "Detroiter"), jobs, wives, training, etc etc... The miles were just rolling away, talking and jogging. We hit the halfway point where we all realized we hadn't really slowed down enough. In fact we were probably in a lot of trouble, just didn't feel like it at this point. We had a few miles in there that were purposely slower, but somehow we'd balance it out with a sped up mile right after. Our group of 4 began to break up right around 17 or 18, but we were still within earshot of each other. I ended up being by myself near the 18 mile mark, with legs feeling great, like we had been out for a long jog. Mile 19 I noticed no gatorade, just water. Got upset, for no reason. Mile 20 you run over a mat to get your split, no problem. 50 yards past the mat my HAMSTRING grabs me and stops me in my tracks. I immediately stop and stretch and it unlocks. Felt weird to have happened, but it was probably gone as quickly as it came. I thought...okay, same problem I had in Chicago09, but at least there I had that problem near 24, not 20. I was also in much worse shape for Chicago..so this can't be happening again. The hamstring loosened up and I "gave back" just about one minute to the marathon gods. Then the wheels just started to fall off one by one. From 21 forward, it was a battle of determination like I've never had before. To make a really long story short, the first 20 miles were run at 7:24 pace at what felt like a jog. The last 6.2 miles were run at 9:40 pace (estimated) where I "ran" 200 yards, stopped to stretch my hamstring, and repeated that process more than 40 times. Miles 25 and 26 were probably 40 seconds faster per mile than were miles 23 and 24, so something was starting to work, I was just running out of miles to fix the problem. It doesn't help that I took nearly 3 minutes to run the last .2 because of the cramp(s), which now included my inner thigh on the same leg as the hamstring issue.
Things done right:
Training
Pre-race diet and hydration
Mental relaxation
Things that need to be improved:
When I say 7:28, that doesn't mean 7:24
Stretching during the entire training program
More visits to Ormsbee to work out scar tissue found in hamstring
Train with race pace specific tail ends OR FASTER for long runs
Drop more weight (Race weight was 190)
Final Time: 3:27:19 (28 seconds off my "PR")
