I’ve run in much hotter weather. I’ve run in much humider (er, more humid) weather. But for some reason, this race made me feel like my internal organs were roasting from the inside. It made me feel a smidgen guilty for the turkey we had at Thanksgiving. Oh, who am I kidding? Tom T. Turkey was delicious and I have no regrets on that.
But I did feel overtly overheated and dehydrated. I kept dousing myself with water at the water stops… yet no one else running seemed to be struggling like me.
Each mile was slower than the one before which is all well and good… but further… and farther… in the closing six miles my heart was pounding like I was a hummingbird. It wasn’t a heart attack… but it certainly wasn’t beating as normal.
I did have a guy come up to me around mile 22 and he encouraged me to keep pace with him. He said he was struggling and could use the support himself. I tried to keep up but I kept starting and stopping… my irregular pace akin to my irregular heartbeat.
He told me he was from Manchester and he was here on a month-long holiday with his wife… of course he was British. Europeans are the only folks I know who can just pop off for a month’s time. Really nice guy. Asked me if this was my first marathon. I demurred and huffed and puffed and said, “no…” yet opting not to elaborate that even on marathon 464 I was feeling like a disastrous imposter. This was his third, he said, and he said this was the point in thr race where he questioned his life choices and why he was running a marathon… but laughed and added, “course, next week I’ll sign up for another one.” A runner is a runner… even in the face of adversity!
***
The start of the race might have been on the moors of Scotland… if Scotland embraced a low-rent, Disney-knock-off beach town vibe.
Play misty for me, yeah?
With sunrise, the mist slowly began to dissipate… but it was a good hour into the race before it finally burned off.
A spur of the moment route change due to an unexpected road closure had us start the race with a quick 0.4 mile out and back. But that meant all the mile markers were off by 0.8 miles until 15. It messed with my head… even though I knew the numbers were wrong, seeing a lower number than I felt I had run was demoralizing.
So too was the weird dead end jug handle that meant we wound our way in a kind of running corkscrew to turnarounds that looked back on earlier and later miles depending on if we were coming or going. And if that sentence is confusing, you’ve just experienced a written form of what the run was like.
I was able to keep ahead of the 3:30 pace group until mile 17… and then they pulled far, far ahead of me…
It was a tough day. Physically. Emotionally. Cardiacally. But I finished. And after getting some food into me, I felt significantly better.
Of course, like the runner for Manchester said, I’ve already got another race set up for next week. So… once more unto the breach, yeah? Once more unto a beach… the Palm Beaches Marathon to be exact.
