Finally! The big day has arrived. As always, sleep the night before was not great. There's just no good way for me to control that adrenaline from kicking in early. Despite that, I was reasonably well-rested and eager to get out on the course, despite being a bit fearful about just how warm it was going to be.
Well, part of the reason why I got up at 4am was because the hostel was actually putting out a breakfast for the runners. What he neglected to tell me at check-in was that this would be on the ground floor, behind a door that was closed when I arrived. I thought it was going to be on the first floor, where the rules of the house dictate that all the guests are supposed to eat -- no food is permitted in the guest rooms. So, turns out that I merely ate my usual pre-marathon meal (granola bars and banana). Oh well. I was looking forward to seeing what he put out.
Next was getting my sneakers on. Normally this is not something that should even deserve remarking on, but this time it did. As per usual, I put on two pairs of socks: my Injinji toe socks *and* my Wrightsocks (which themselves are a double-sock by design). I do this on race days when I expect it to be raining or I will be dousing myself with lots of water, as I wind up getting blisters a little too easily in those conditions. Getting the socks on is easy. But the sneakers... I had just starting using this style of shoe less than 2 weeks before, and had only gotten about 25 miles of break-in time on them. While that was enough to know I could deal with the shoes, it wasn't enough to determine whether my feet would be able to properly deal with them once they swell during the latter stages of the race, since the longest run I had gotten in on them was 13 miles.
Getting to the starting area could only have been easier by choosing a place a bit closer to Grant Park. As it is, I chose a place in Greektown. In fact, what I didn't know when I made my reservation was that the hostel was literally along the marathon route, around Mile 12. Well, it was about a 1-mile (or a drop longer) walk straight along Van Buren to get to Michigan Avenue. Just a short jaunt to the right from there, and I was at my designated entrance to the park. I quickly make my way through security, meander through much of the area to get to the baggage check area (despite not checking any bag), pick up an extra sleeve of Endurance chews, hit the porta potty, and proceed to the corral where I sit for an hour while the same brief loop of video material is played on the jumbotron. As the corral fills up and it gets close to 7am, I make my way out to line up one last time at the portapotty and then head in to join up with the pace group that has slowly assembled while I was out of the corral.
7:30 arrives and we're off! Well, Corral A was off. Corral B (where I was) needed to wait until 7:35 before we were set loose. Then, off like a shot. For the most part, during the first 7 miles, I paid little attention to my watch, as I was merely making sure to keep pace with our pace group leaders. Turns out that they were going quite a bit faster than they had said they were going to do, but I didn't know that given my non-reliance on the Garmin this time. Paired with the heat (it was 74F by the time we were at Mile 5), this would lead to problems with achieving my sub-3. As I started drifting further back from the pacers, I started looking at my watch to see what was happening. Sub-3 was quickly slipping away.
Well, as you can guess from further above, my feet did NOT do well later on. These ASICS Metaspeed Sky sneakers only come in a Regular (D) width. However, I always by Wide (EE) sneakers. They were tough to get on during my trial runs when only using a single pair of socks, it was definitely a bit tricky with both these pairs. But I managed. And there seemed to be enough room at the front of the sneaker to expand into.
Mile 17. My big toes (especially the one on my left foot) start hurting. A lot. And they only hurt even more the further I go. I know for sure that this is a problem because of the width of the shoe and not having enough space overall to swell into, but have no idea exactly what has happened. Did I actually wind up spraining or even breaking either big toe or both? It's certainly not unheard of for that to happen during a marathon. Was it something else?
The cheering of the crowd definitely helped quite a bit to grit through the pain of my toes. Amazingly enough, my glutes and quads were totally fine -- they didn't feel sore or lock up at all. Possible that the style of sports massage that I had gotten just a few days before was what I needed to prevent problems there.
I see 3 hours come and go, and I still had 2 miles to go. In the end, mostly because of the heat but possibly in small part because of the shoes, I wind up finishing in 3:15:33. It's a BQ, and one that would be sufficient for my registering for Boston 2022 given I age-up, but one that I don't need since I still have my 3:02:02 PR/GWR that can be used from Oct 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment