Months ago, I reserved a parking spot in the Hyatt Centric hotel in Rosslyn -- something I've done before successfully. It is literally right at the corner of the perimeter of the finisher's village. Unfortunately, when I arrived in the area this morning at about 5:05am, I was greeted by the corner one block away being blocked by police cars. The officers were under orders to not let anyone through apart from vendors and people with physical parking passes from the hotel. Well, no, I bought this online (showed the reservation in the app). No go. Good luck finding other parking nearby. (Ugh!) Mercifully, I was able to find on-street parking only about 1 block away.
After using the facilities in the hotel anyway (and not being stopped by anyone, thankfully), I made my usual trek down to the Fort Meyers entrance (by the charity runner's village). No issues - flew through that area as per normal, and wound up hooking up with someone else doing the same.
Since 2013, I've been going in this way to get to the runner's village. I knew that it was moved compared to previous years, but figured we'd be able to go easily from that normal area to the new location. Well, the police officers stationed there were surprised to see us. They had no clue how we got there, nor that there was a checkpoint that we had been able to get through. They also didn't really know how to get to the new area, unfortunately -- not quickly, anyway. We were directed to the climb the hill up to the overpass we had just passed under -- it's "just 3 football fields away," to walk along the perimeter of the Pentagon, and meet up with everyone getting off the Metro. When we started out, we were at 2 miles -- the normal distance I'm used to doing to get to this long-time runner's village. After stopping to ask directions from a few people on the way, we eventually found the crowd and joined the lemmings. It was a totally ludicrous route that they had us take, going to kingdom come, never actually having a real runner's village that I could discern.
Eventually, after making our way along a portion of the tail end of the marathon course, we came to the various UPS trucks to drop off our bags. THREE miles later -- for a total of five miles excess compared to the race. Ugh!
Luckily, after taking off my long-sleeve MCM mock turtleneck (to leave just the singlet) and finishing my last prep to drop off my bag, I made my way to the meet-up point for the Marathon Maniacs Pacers. Decent group of people gathered. After we took our group photo, we quickly departed, and made our way to the corrals.
After making a quick pitstop and the uncrowded porta-potties, I entered the corral, and had plenty of people asking me what the strategy was for the race. Even effort: slower on the uphills, especially in the crowded first 2+ miles, faster on the downhills, slow during the water stations.
Standard opening ceremonies completed, the flyover was nearly directly over the start line when the howitzer starting the race went off.
The first several miles, there was a decent amount of conversation with some of my group, everyone enjoying the race. Somehwere along the line, the 3:50 pacers actually passed me -- which should never have happened. I was perfectly on pace still, so when someone pointed them out, it was extremely confusing for all involved. After a little while, I finally passed them in Georgetown and kept them behind me the rest of the time.
Down through the halfway mark, we still had a decent group together, and we were right on time per my pace band. (Given that it was actually a planned negative split given the conservative start, it otherwise looked like I was behind, but I wasn't.) Inside the District, the pace started to slip a drop, but still within the buffer I had built in. But by the time we finally Beat the Bridge, and before we got to the off-ramp, my built-in buffer (30 seconds) was nearly gone. Once we got back into VA, I made sure to tell everyone around me that we were slipping off pace, and that if they have it in the tank, they should pull away from me. I didn't notice anyone take advantage of that. By that point, I think many of my group had already fallen back as opposed to breaking forward.
Mile by mile at that point, I was slowing all the more. I eventually took off my knit cap and put it over my pacer sign so that the announcer would not be callling out the pace group when I crossed the finish line, given that we would be considerably late. In the end, I wound up crossing in 3:44:46. Inherently good time, but major fail for someone who is one of the pacers for 3:40:00 (who was shooting for 3:39:30).
Garmin says I ran an extra .3 miles, which translates to about 2-3 minutes. Possible that my extra pre-race mileage took out some of my energy (I never had the chance to just sit beforehand), but there's no way to sufficiently quantify that. And I kept my hat on the whole time, even after the temps were surely in the mid-50s (though I did sneak my ears out to release some of that heat), so it's possible my core temp was a little too high. (Again, no easy way to quantify that.)
Could I have done better? Surely. But figuring out all the lessons to learn is really tricky. Hopefully they'll be willing to have me back on the team next year, though maybe I would be better off with a slightly slower time. (I'll be running the 50k, so, maybe 5 hours (like in 2019) or 5:30.) Plenty of time to figure it out.
Next up: New York City on Sunday. Hopefully my recovery this week (with a fair bit of walking on Thursday and Friday) will go well. I won't be running with a pace band, rather will just be running for feel (though I may start with a pace group).
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