I wrote this blogpost during the marathon that I won Saturday. Ask Jim, I told him about it. How did I get here? Let me back up.
I turned 35 this weekend, kind of a lame birthday in the birthday spectrum. First, it means I can now be POTUS according to the US Constituion and I am not. That troubles me. Second, it means I am in an older age group. Third, I feel that I am now 100% officially out of the "Young Adult" category. Four, I don't have a wife and kids (that I know about, wink wink). Five, it was sort of novel to have grey hair when I was 17. At 35 I just look haggard. So for those five reasons I decided early in the week that I would run a marathon on my birthday and I found this one. I breakfasted with Jim last week and seeing the state I was in mentally he didn't hesitate to jump in with me.
So we sign up, have a few drinks Friday night and meet up at the wee hours of Saturday morning to head down to Huntington Beach. Mind you, neither of us is trained for this thing, I haven't run more than 13 miles since August and he is just coming off the World Championships for ITU Long Course in Perth, AUS. The whole point was to finish, nothing more.
Then we showed up at the "race site". It was a neighborhood park. And no one was there except for a dude in his van with 2 Gatorade jugs and some chalk. I am not making any of this up. Then a woman shows up and I roll down the window of Jim's creepy van and ask her if she is here for the race, in spite of the fact that she is holding cash and a registration form. She says yes but I tell her the race is sold out, too many people. She freaks out, I laugh. No one ever laughs at my jokes. Anyhow, by now it is 6:15, the race is scheduled to start at 6:30 and a few more people show up. Jim and I get out of the car, go to the "start line" (chalk on the ground) and the race director says "which one of you is Brian and which one is Jim". It would appear that we were in the right place. It's 6:25, there are 11 of us by my count and we seem ready to start. That is when he announces the race course. 10 laps of 2.62 miles. Again, I am not kidding. None of this is a joke. Jim just got back from the Elite Long Course WORLD Championships. We are both wearing TNS running shirts, racing flats, warming up, and here is this race. And I cannot stop laughing. This is 100%, exactly what I had hoped for. It was so laid back, so inexplicable, so different and fun.
And then I realized I could win. Well, more specifically podium, lest I forget who I was running with. But we couldn't start the race until Rob showed up. Who is Rob? The race director's buddy who supposedly runs a 3:01 who would be running with his dog. So we waited. When is the last time you did a race that was delayed so you could wait for a racer? It was pretty funny. Rob finally drives up, then takes forever to get out of his car and I say he may be fast, but he needs to work on that car to start line split. Rob lines up with his dog and we are off. The first loop was Jim, Rob, the dog, a guy named Sam and me. And we are all evenly matched. The course is so "grassroots" that those guys missed a turn and I called for them and we slowed down to wait for them to catch back up. We were all together for the first loop (19:00) but Jim and I ran sub 18 for the second loop and lost them. There were a bunch of turnarounds so we could see our lead growing, but at the 5th and 6th loops my IT band really tightened up and started tugging on my knee and our pace slowed considerably. The guy named Sam started to close the gap a bit so our last 4 loops were fast. Our last loop was sub-18 and we pounded.
Now before we get to the big finish, it needs to be said that Jim would have been sub-3 hours. It also needs to be said that my fastest marathon time was last year at Ironman Arizona, 3:39. It became clear when we crossed the halfway point of this race at 1:34 that we would crush that.
So back to the big finish. My body was shutting down at this point. I hadn't gone to the Ipod for 95% of the race, but I put it on with 2 miles to go. The aforementioned crazy lady was in our sights and we tried to catch her so we could lap her but it was obvious that she wasn't having any of it. She kept doing that move where she would turn around slightly to see where we are and then run faster. Jim tried to push me to run faster but I didn't have any more to give. I have to guess our last mile was 6:30. I was getting dizzy and everything was closing in so I just turned up the music and gritted it out. We were side by side and I suggested that we confuse the race director and cross the line holding hands but we just sort of approached the line and at the very last second Jim stopped and said happy birthday. It was pretty cool. I could slap a dozen asterisks on this race, but at the end of the day, we ran a race really fast and we won. That is pretty cool.
More than anything, it was a reminder that I have some great friends.
Thoughts on Resting and Training
16 hours ago