I am a marathoner

I ran a marathon yesterday.  No big deal. 

It was hard, I’m not going to lie.  And it didn’t go quite how I’d expected.  But I’m happy with my experience and I’m glad I did it.

I really thought I could finish in 5 hours.  My training had gone really well and I used a bunch of different online calculators to see what they projected my finish time would be using current training times.  Depending on what times I entered, the projected times were around 5:10 or so.  I thought I could push it a bit and hit 5 hours.

I told people I was hoping to finish in 5:30 or sometimes I just didn’t even talk about finish times but in my heart I was hoping for 5 hours.  I am not disappointed with my time, not really.  It took a full hour longer than I wanted it to but I don’t think I could have done anything to change that, at least not yesterday.  And I have some ideas about how things are for the next marathon, if I decide to do another one.

Yesterday was amazing and the first half was incredible.  I felt fast and strong and I enjoyed it so much.  The second half was much harder. I think I knew it would be harder, I just didn’t know how much.  This race included a half marathon and the half marathoners split off the course at about mile 11.  That split was incredibly hard.  Knowing that they were almost done and that I still had so far to go was really difficult.  And then the marathon course entered a really boring and lonely section so that made it doubly difficult.

I think I just have to prepare more for the mentally challenging middle section next time. Miles 10-20 were so hard and I really think that was more about my mind than about my body.   I have other thoughts and other places I think I can improve but for today, I’m a marathoner.  It was awesome in so many ways.  I did it!  And that’s enough.

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