Nope.
Didn’t happen.
I didn’t BQ.
And I realized I wasn’t going to around mile 20 when the 3:10 pace group caught up to me and passed me, disappearing into the horizon as I found myself hobbling a bit here and there.
Knowing that the previous miles would now be building not to a qualifying time but to a not-qualifying time, I struggled even more than perhaps my body intended.
It was a bummer. Felt like the whole weekend was a waste of time, money, and energy.
A lot of things of late have felt like that. I thought I had things in hand and figured out and then… well… it just didn’t matter.
In the big scheme of things this all doesn’t even rank a footnote to the world’s troubles far and wide.
But it mattered to me. And it was a huge disappointment.
To give some perspective, last week I was 2nd in my age group with a slightly slower time than what I finished up with at Mt Charleston. But here I was 51st in my age bracket.
A lot of people qualified for Boston here… I wasn’t one of them.
After a long, lonely drive home (lonely despite a lot of traffic leading to near-misses and delays), I got home and tried to come up with a “shucks, them’s the breaks” post, trying to focus on rising sun photos from the course. I thought I’d do something akin to “as the sun rose, my chances for Boston fell” or some such pseudo-clever phrasing.
But alas even my web server was down. There was a big storm and we lost power… so I’m not sure if my home web server is fried or just needs to be reconnected somehow. Honestly, I was a bit too flustered with the day’s death by the thousand papercuts to try and troubleshoot.
Today, I’m still not sure what is wrong. Eventually this post will go up with a few odd photos… but just as I felt with the Mt Charleston Marathon itself, it really doesn’t matter. Time’s arrow and all that.
