I ran a marathon in September. It was the Clarence DeMar marathon in New Hampshire and it started at 8:00am in some town I had never heard of with the temperature at 4C (that means cold for my fellow Americans of the Fahrenheit persuasion). I had been training for this race for about 12 weeks and I felt pretty good about meeting my goal of qualifying for the Boston marathon, which meant finishing 26.2 miles in under 3 hours 5 minutes. I feel like the training is something that is overlooked or just under appreciated sometimes despite that being at least 50% of the total effort that goes into the marathon.
I ended up finishing the marathon in 2 hours 56 minutes 22 seconds:
This was also a 23 minute improvement and personal best from my first marathon in November 2015. I think the biggest difference between these two races was the extra 4 weeks of training I had for my second marathon over the first one. Endurance running in general is about consistency and for the marathon, that means training consistently for many weeks before a race. I had a solid daily training schedule for both of my marathons, but I was unable to give myself enough time over a long term period to prepare for it. This was made very obvious to me in the last 3 miles of both races.
In my first marathon, I hit the "wall" at mile 23 and it took me another 30-40 minutes to finish the race. I was fully aware of my surroundings and knew more or less what was happening, but I couldn't even will myself into running until the very last few minutes of the race. This is in contrast to my second marathon where I started feeling particularly fatigued around mile 23 or 24, but I was nowhere near the same broken-down state as I was in my first race.
Of course, the second race benefited from the experience of the first as well as a few other motivating factors I haven't mentioned yet like Clark the cat and some trophies from a 5K back in May 2016:
Clark lives with another graduate student in the astronomy department. We stayed at his house (the grad student's, but I suppose it was Clark's house too) the night before the Clarence DeMar marathon and Clark was kind enough to keep us all company.
Just before I formally started training for my second marathon, I did a sort of "rust buster" 5K. I was part-way treating it as a work out, but I ended up crossing the finish line before anyone else and receiving these two trophies.
On the left is a picture of me running back home with them.
This is also why I prefer medals. Those trophies were heavy.
So between the 5K at very start of my training up until the night before the race, I found a few small things to keep me motivated. Hopefully being on the front page of the Clarence DeMar marathon webpage will serve as some more motivation for all the training and races I do in the future.
:^)