It's been almost a month since I ran my first marathon, so I thought I would finally post a message about it.
First off, I finished! The 2007 Country Music Marathon in Nashville, TN, is in the history books! I crossed the finish line 4 hours 43 minutes 52 seconds after crossing the starting line. What an experience!
I never thought I would even consider running a marathon in my lifetime, but I'm glad I decided to join my friends Mark and Darren in the training and in the marathon itself. My knee hurt for days afterward, but I think it was worth it. People have told me how impressed they are that I ran a marathon, but I didn't do it for glory, or for boasting. I'm not even certain why I did it, in fact, other than I told Darren that if he joined the YMCA then I would run the marathon with them (I had been on the fence about it beforehand).
Anyway, the course had a few more hills than we had trained for, and the weather was warmer than what we had trained for, so the run was quite a bit tougher than what we had prepared our bodies for.
We never did find Scott at the starting line--he was staying at a different hotel with some high school buddies who were also running, so we weren't too worried about him. Mark was the first to show some signs of trouble. He started complaining about difficulty of breathing, and after 11 or 12 miles he told Darren and I not to wait for him. So Darren and I ran the second half of the marathon by ourselves, and Mark was solo.
We had trained by running for 10 minutes and then walking for one minute, but by mile 20 we were needing a walk break every 5 minutes. We had expected this, though, since the same thing happened during our longest training run (which was about 22 miles). However, after mile 23, Darren got a severe cramp in his left hamstring, which reduced us to walking for about 4 minutes and jogging for 30 seconds or so. He finally managed to massage it out and put some ice on it (a first aid station was conveniently located at about mile 24), so we started jogging a little more frequently at that point. [This was the third part of the race course that went out and back, and we were on the back part when we saw Mark and Scott coming toward us on the out part of the leg. Darren and I felt much better about Mark at that point, once we knew that Mark had found someone to run with.]
But instead of watching the clock, we starting finding landmarks and would run to it (the third phone pole, or a car parked on the side of the road, or an overpass, for example), and then walk to the next landmark we picked out.
But we ran the final 1/2 mile to the finish line!
After the race we walked around quite a bit, got some food, stretched, you know--all the usual post-running things. Then went to get lunch at the San Antonio Taco Company. For some reason I wasn't very hungry--must have been all the post-race snacks I ate. We then made our way back to the hotel for some rum drinks and some sitting around. We thought about hopping in the pool or the hot tub, but never made it down there. We had dinner at the Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, which was pretty good.
Overall, like I mentioned above, it was quite an experience. We're already talking about doing another marathon later this year--Mark wants to do better time-wise. I'd do it just because I got used to running and I enjoy Mark's, Darren's, and Scott's company. It's my "guy time" that I never really had before I started running with them.
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