revid | In case you were wondering about my sanity...

So, what did Mary do today? one might ask.

Ran The Buzz Marathon this morning. This teensy tiny marathon (like 70 or so runners) is held on an Air National Guard Base about 55 miles north of my home. I really always have wanted to do this someday, and today was it. I've been running for almost 3 years now, and being somewhat goal oriented, I have found that I really need to schedule periodic races, otherwise I get all "Now why am I doing this exactly?"

I followed a plan I found for the last 14 weeks--pretty consistently, I might add. It was definitely a minimalist plan, with the weeks averaging about 40-45 miles, with a peak week of 52 miles and a longest training run of 18 miles, so I had minimalist expectations as well. Anyway, conventional wisdom is that for anyone's first marathon, the goal should be merely to finish.

The bad news is that my finishing time sucked. Bad. Very Badly. Worse than it should have been based on my training paces. I pretty much knew by about mile 5 or 6 that I wasn't going to have a stellar performance, but I can't really say why. My legs felt like lead and I ended up walking a good portion of the second half. Plus, this is a very hilly course, and even though I did some hill training, clearly it wasn't enough! And later in the race, I sort of lost the mental battle, which is the kiss of death. I never "bonked" or "hit the wall" that you hear runners complain about, I just never had it going on the entire race.

But here's the good news: I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a perfect day for a race, cool and sunny. It was a beautiful course, lush and green. And all the finishers got a bottle of local wine. I will be enjoying some shortly! I'm a little tired right now, as you might guess, but I feel good. With the exception of a blister on my L 2nd toe (which didn't bother me until AFTER the race), and some chafing under my L arm, I am pretty well unscathed and pain-free. So much so that I'll probably go for a short (2 or 3 mile) run tomorrow.

And I didn't finish last. :-) Close, but not last. There's a saying in running:

DFL>DNF>DNS

which means Dead Fucking Last is better than Did Not Finish is better than Did Not Start.

I'd feel better if I had beat Oprah's time (4:29) or even Katie Holmes's time (5:30), but NOOOOOOO, my time was 5:35, or about 12:45 minutes per mile. The thing is, I did my 18 mile training run with ease doing 11:15 mpm, and I did several 10 mile runs at 10 mpm, so I know I'm capable of a much better performance. Like seriously, I should be able to cut an hour off that time. I'm thinking maybe here. It's the day after my 49th birthday. How rad is that? :-)

As I was pulling on to the freeway on my way home, I turned on the radio and the first song that came on was "She." I love my band so much. It made me think of my favorite performance of that song:

Madison Square Garden, December 1994. Too bad he's too mature to do that stuff anymore. Either that or his kids would disown him.

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend!