THE Marathon Monday

** Note – I finished writing this on April 29th but I had reservations about posting it. When I read through my words, they felt flat, negative, ungrateful and overall – uninspiring. I had plans of editing this to finish on a more positive note but after gaining some perspective, I think sharing as-is is just the ticket.

Despite the best training block I think I’ve ever executed, being injury-free and, in my not-so-humble opinion, being the most fit I’ve ever been for the marathon distance – I just ran my slowest marathon since 2017 at my goal race – the 2024 Boston Marathon.

What the damn hell! (This was the alternate title for this week’s post)

The morning of the 2024 Boston Marathon was electric and despite having run it in 2021 – it was a new experience for me. I felt like I had lived a full day before the race even started. A unique characteristic of the Boston Marathon is that it starts quite late, with the elites setting off around 9:30am and the amateurs setting off in waves at 10am, 10:25am, 10:50am and 11:15am. For most other road marathons, it would be common, even for the average runner, to be finished around those respective times of day.

Having traveled down to Boston with a group including two spectators (Tom and Andrei) and four racers (Andy, Saira, Heather and myself) – we were spread amongst the corrals with Andy starting at 10, Saira and Heather at 10:25 and me, bringing up the rear, at 10:50. I rolled out of bed just as Andy was leaving the hotel room to catch his shuttle to the start. Saira and Heather were heading out while I sipped my coffee and force-fed myself a disgusting-at-the-time bagel. Having been seeded in the third wave based on my qualifying time which was not quite as fast as any of my friends, I was in no rush. It was a leisurely 7:30am by the time I left the hotel myself to walk the 25 minutes to the shuttle pickup point, where I would find more buses than I knew even existed, arranged in an endless line to shuttle 30,000 runners from downtown Boston to the start at Hopkinton (just 42km down the road). After a security checkpoint, a heartbreaking announcement about a ‘lone, size 10.5 orange Hoka shoe ‘ that had been found (someone was about to have a bad day) I boarded my shuttle at 8:15am and was on my way for the ~1hr ride to the start line. Taking care to keep the calories and carbs flowing after breakfast, I managed to polish off a gatorade during the bus ride.

Once we arrived in Hopkinton, I got my first taste of athlete’s village, which wasn’t in-play for the late-covid time that was the fall of 2021 when I ran Boston the first time. In 2021, we simply hopped off the bus (which dropped us a few hundred metres from the start line), used the wait-free porta-potties at our leisure and, once ready, simply walked up to the start line for a rolling start. This meant we just…..started the race, whenever we felt like it – it was such a weird feeling but it was very much hassle-free. This year though, things are back to normal and, much to my displeasure, I found myself in a 45 minute porta-pottie line. It was about 10:20 by the time I emerged from my pottie break and started the ~ 20 minute walk to the start line and into my corral, of which there were eight in my wave, and I was lucky enough to be in corral one. This is great because it meant I got to start near the front of the several thousand other runners in my wave, but bad because I had spent so much time waiting for the bathroom that I now had to carve my way through those few thousand people to get to said corral! I missed the seemingly VIP treatment of 2021, but it was cool to take in the full experience.

The entire time I spent at athlete’s village, I had to face something I had been in denial about the entire week leading up to the race: it was hot as balls. Andy had warned our group that with the forecast temperatures, we should expect about a 6% decrease in performance for the time I was going for, which would translate my 3hrs to a 3:10. If I’m honest, I refused to accept his words of caution, especially when they were based off the forecast alone, which was for it to start off around 15 degrees and progress to about 18 by the time I finished. I practiced a “no excuses” mentality for the week and didn’t think it would serve me to give myself an out or worry about what I couldn’t control. Standing there, the morning of the race in athlete’s village and feeling the sun beaming on my already-sunscreen-covered skin – I couldn’t ignore it. It was warm, at rest, in a tanktop and shorts. Andy and Saira had both expressed their concern over me going out too fast the night before and I felt a determination to prove them wrong. As I walked to the start line, I changed my plan from: hang on to sub 3 pace at all costs to: go for it, but be honest about your effort in these temperatures unless you want to absolutely implode out there.

After a brief bottleneck where I resigned myself to start in corral 7, I was able to push up to corral 1 with 5minutes to spare, with only a handful of other runners ahead of me. Initially perturbed at being seeded behind all my friends, based on a qualifying time that was 23+ minutes slower than I hoped to run, I was stoked once I got into my corral. The previous wave had left a solid 25 minutes before and the course ahead of us was wide open – this was actually an improvement from my experience in 2021 where everyone was allowed to start at-will and it was fairly congested. I used my last few minutes in the corral to check Andy’s 10km split since he had set off 50 minutes earlier – he was right on 2:56 pace clocking 4:10 km’s. I wondered if/when I would catch Saira and Heather – if we all ran the times we were hoping for, I should catch up with them somewhere in the back half of the race, which was something to look forward to. I envisioned us connecting in the final few hundred metres down Boylston and how cool it would be to cross the finish line together!

After being mildly terrified when the gun went off due to my proximity to the start line, I started my playlist and set out, taking care not to absolutely rip the first kilometre which is the steepest downhill of the course. My watch beeped a 4:10km right as I passed the 1km marking which was a relief as it felt easy (like it should when you lose 40m on a downhill), but I also knew I wouldn’t be running many more 4:10 km’s, at least this early. I settled in to the first 10km, aiming to keep my heart rate in the mid to high 160’s, an effort I know I can sustain but with some buffer for when I inevitably heat up. My effort stayed the same while my paces wavered with the gentle, rolling terrain. I fluctuated between 4:09 and 4:23 the first 10km and felt like I was right where I needed to be. I dumped water on my head at every aid station from the get go and alternated sipping from my two handhelds, one with water, one with tailwind at every kilometer. I’ve heard from a few people following along that they “knew I wasn’t having a great day” when my first 10km was off pace but from my perspective, I felt controlled and right on track, like I was nailing the effort but not forcing things. Having absolutely obliterated my quads the first time I ran the race in 2021, I was conscious about repeating the mistake this time around and figured I was actually being a smartypants by running slower than goal marathon pace. Haha….haha……hahah **insert cry laughing here**.

It was undoubtedly warm, but it didn’t feel terrible, just not great. I noticed my heart rate drop every time I poured water on my head, I was taking gels and drinking lots and I wasn’t getting hotter, so I felt like I was managing my effort well and like I had room to rally later. As the course leveled off and the free-for-all downhill miles waned, my pace did slow to the 4:20-4:30 range from about 11-22km, but I stayed my course and stayed true to my effort. I came through the half marathon point at 1:32:46, almost three minutes behind my 2021 time, feeling about as good as I remember from that point in 2021 but certain that I had played it smarter this time. I asked myself – can you do that again, even split and get a 3:05 something? And honestly, my answer was yes, so I was feeling good.

4:20’s were starting to consistently turn to 4:30’s at the same effort level. My belly felt very full and sloshy, I had finished both my handhelds by the halfway point and I felt like I wasn’t digesting what I was putting in my body. Despite having used the porta-pottie at the last possible opportunity before the race started, I felt an increasing urgency to pee. Gross but….maybe I even peed myself a little a few times, but I tried to ignore it – I felt like taking a pee break was a step towards giving up on chasing after the best time I could that day. I knew how angry I would be, looking back, if I had wasted even 30 seconds in the bathroom – what if I ran 3:00:29!? Or even 3:05:29? Eventually, the scales tipped and I felt like I couldn’t put any other fuel into my body unless something came out; a quick pee break seemed worth it if would help me digest and feel better for the rest of the race so I darted off around 25km and took the hit of a 5:02 km, but no big deal.

26km is where things deteriorated, quickly, in an all-too-familiar way. My quads had started to become sore (as they do in a marathon) but it didn’t seem insurmountable, until this point of the race. The second steepest descent of the race falls in km 26 and as soon as I hit it, instead of relief and reprieve, I felt that unmistakable cramping of quads so trashed that I was begging for uphills. It hurt and instead of suffer through that hurt, whether it was my mind or my legs that gave up – my downhill running started deteriorating towards a hobble. I don’t really know why, but I just started to let myself take walk breaks to give my quads a break. That felt shitty, because something I pride myself on from the last time my quads blew up in Boston is that I refused to walk, I jogged as slowly as I needed to to get ‘er done that day and this time, I just gave up so easily. I’m not sure if it was having the excuse of the heat (which ironically, didn’t really bother me all that much the last third of the race since I backed off the effort) or if my quads were actually more fucked up this time, but there was more walking that I can recall in several years during the last 10-15km of this race.

Somewhere, during all this, I spied Saira and Heather in the crowd up ahead and that distracted me for a while. By the time I caught Saira, Heather had taken advantage of feeling good and sped up slightly ahead. As I passed and asked how she was doing, Saira uttered some temperature-related expletives I won’t repeat here. While it didn’t exactly make me happy to hear she was succumbing to the heat, it did soothe my ego that I wasn’t the only one not having an A plus day out there. A short while later I caught Heather and she shouted encouraging words (isn’t everything that comes out of Heather’s mouth encouraging!?) probably unaware that I was dying a slow death. We ended up yoyo’ing for the rest of the race, I, having slowed down a lot had a shocking amount of gusto heading up any uphills but as soon as I crested the top, I caved and walked down. Ultimately, Heather passed me one last time (without realizing) and we would reconvene in the finisher’s chute.

As I write this, I find myself compelled to ask myself why I quit so easily but I also know at the time, I could not get my stupid legs to do any more. I was, and am still, really frustrated by that. I know that it was a hot day and maybe that could have been a perfectly reasonable justification to not have run the time I wanted, but I adjusted my paces and expected to be able to still run a great race. I honestly can’t believe my legs fell apart like they did, I feel embarrassed that of all things, that was my demise. I got so beat up the first time around and I knew I should have done some more downhill specific conditioning (to be fair, I did do 3-4 downhill-focused runs at pace) and I feel like that’s something I left on the table.

Anyways, I tried not to throw any pity parties on-course, or even after the race (I did allow myself one cry in the shower which I’m pretty sure all my friends pretended not to notice). After all, the crowds were absolutely bonkers (much, much more so than in 2021) and it was front and center in my mind that so many people don’t get to do this race. Just this year alone, over 11,000 runners ran a qualifying time but didn’t make it into the race due to high demand, and I was not going to be miserable and take my luck for granted. Though I was also definitely thinking “I’m not ever doing this fucking race again”. I walk-jogged it in, keeping an eye out for Andrei and Tom on the left side of the course somewhere between 39km and the finish. I was bleeding time, and found myself bemused that I had considered an A, B and C goal, with the implied D-goal of: just finish. I definitely had not even considered that the D goal outcome would truly mean finishing close to 15 minutes behind my time in 2021, eventually clocking a 3:28 something.

The knife in the wound was when my playlist ran out after 3 hrs and 16 minutes (because…..I thought that was enough of a buffer) but I took it in stride, laughed to myself and restarted it. Turns our Lizzo – About Damn Time was exactly what I needed to hear 40km in. A huge reflection I have from this race day is that I wish I chose a different marathon to pursue my goal time at, so that I could fully take in the atmosphere of the race and truly enjoy it. I found the challenging nature of Boston’s course appealing, adding a certain badassery to my resume should I achieve it. Imagining having a breakthrough day on the course with those crowds and support would make achieving an aggressive goal time that more amazing, but it was a gamble. In the end, it took away from my ability to soak in the special experience of the course and I will (try) to consider that next time. When I look through all my race photos, I look miserable in every single one.

Even during “a bad day in Boston”, I don’t understand how you can make that left turn on Boylston and not enjoy it. It’s iconic, you can finally see the finish and the crowds are at their peak. Despite this, I managed to spot Andrei and Tom and gave my best impression of the *shrug* emoji with a smile on my face. Also, my legs magically decided they could run a 4:20 km again which is rather suspicious to say the least and makes me wonder if I just need to learn to suffer a little better.

The race didn’t go as I had hoped, my ego is bruised and I felt embarrassed knowing so many people were following along. I’m not embarrassed by the time I ran at all. I’m embarrassed by not following through on something I said I would do. It makes me feel like I’ve been tricking people this whole time into thinking I was a sub 3 marathoner only to prove that well…I’m not. It’s times like this that I almost wish I didn’t put my goal out so publicly because it’s very obvious that I did not even come close to achieving what I set out to. I worry people will think I’m an asshat for setting my sights on a time that I, seemingly, keep getting further away from. But at my core, what people think is not what’s actually important to me. I’d rather be the type of person that is vulnerable, puts myself out there and fails 9 times out of 10 than someone that tries to make it all look easy and is only willing to let others in when they’re winning. Also, I do get that it’s just running, but at the end of the day, running is one of many applications of giving your best to something; I think it’s the feeling when you know you didn’t do that, that keeps me up at night.

Moving forward, tears are left behind in the shower-cry and I’m ready to dust myself off for the next one.