It’s befitting that this race has such close ties to NASA because the only way to describe it is that today was my Apollo 13 Marathon. It was a successful failure.
Things started a little rough as despite warnings and doom and proverbial gloom air raid sirens in the Captain’s Log emails leading up to the event there was in fact Race Day Packet Pickup. Every year I fall for this and scurry out to Melbourne, FL, to pick up my packet early as they instruct us to. And every year I get to the staging area and harumph-harumph at the fact that not only is there race day packet pickup but it’s utilized by an astonishing number of people.
I grabbed my traditional “head in a spacesuit” shot on the park’s stage.
I then offered to take a mother/daughter’s pic. But clumsily I backed up too far to frame the shot and as I teetered on the edge of the stage, I realized I was going to fall — I had a choice of falling between the stage and the makeshift fence that only came up to the lip of the stage or to try and fall back farther and leap past the fence and onto the grassy knoll. I opted to leap… and cleared the fence, only to fail to stick the landing. I landed on my back and conked my head like a coconut falling from an island tree. It hurt like the Dickens but I didn’t want the mom and daughter to feel too badly and tried to shake it off. I saved their phone and snapped their photo. The mom asked if I injured anything running related, clearly worried I might have banged up my knee. “Only me head,” I said, “and really who needs that when hitting the roads!”
I wandered over to the Medical Tent and explained I had done something really dumb, falling off the stage and head butting the ground, and asked if they had any tylenol or advil. They didn’t. I mean, why would they? They’re a med tent. Band aids, vaseline, and, um, CPR training dolls seemed to be the only supplies on hand.
I figured if I had a concussion, I should stay awake… so, ya know, running 26.2 miles seemed like a good way to keep alert and moving. Dammit, Jim, I’m a runner, not a doctor!
I then headed to the start line, which was slated to launch the half marathoners at 6 AM and the full marathoners at 6:30 AM (there’s a reason for this… I’m not sure what it is, but there’s a reason. They do it every year and every year I and my fellow runners wonder what the reason might be).
I bumped into a few Mainly Marathon folks throughout the day but only was able to snag a shot with Clyde Shank. He took some group shot selfies though so if he posts them to Facebook, I may try and add them in here before too long.
Per usual, Denise Piercy, the co-race director, counted us down via a Shuttle Launch video (she said it’d count down from 10… but it actually counts down from 12 for some reason). When the count hits zero, she gives us the blast-off yell and we’re off.
My newish iPhone 6S takes terrible low-light photos… I swear it does a worse job than my old iPhone 6. So there aren’t a lot of pics from the opening miles as they’re all blurry or so grainy/noisy as to be unviewable.
The course itself is best summed up as quarters — we go out 6.55 miles (North a 1/4 marathon), turn around and come back to the start line in Cocoa (another 1/4 marathon), then keep heading south for 6.55 miles before turning around once more to finish out the distance back to Cocoa. It’s a giant flattened figure eight, a string theory of space and time.
My strategy is to break the race down into those quarter distances — I try and trick my mind into only focusing on the 6.55 miles at a time in the hopes of an easy race. I was doing really well in the opening quarter, pretty well in the second quarter albeit my stomach grew a bit upset and I needed to pit stop for a bit more gatorade and water and to catch my breath. The presumed ever expanding black and blue bruise on my back made deep breaths a bit painful, like a short stabbing twinge, as if an old adversary had a Kevin voodoo doll and repeatedly stuck it with sharp instruments.
This really was only a problem when I did stop to catch my breath as during the race I have a tendency to keep breaths shallow and quick, whether by design or necessity I can’t say. Despite sounding like I have a strategy with the quarter distances, to be perfectly honest a lot of times I’m just winging it. Hell, I barely know what I’m doing on or off the course and nobody should ever seek my advice on what they should do for an event. The one thing I can say is I’ve empirically proven that you should probably test run your turkey costume to see if you can breath in it before running your race. But that’s probably common sense and nobody ever accused me of having any sense whatsoever.
Here then are shots from along the way, with particular emphasis on the sunrise when I got a few better shots with my camera phone:
After the midway point, things got… tougher. I don’t know if it was the fall, lingering stomach issues, or just good ol’ fashioned personal shortcomings and failures. But my unspoken hope for a BQ and maybe a PR went out the window as the miles caught up to me… or I struggled to catch up to them. I had a cramp and stitch in my side I couldn’t shake. Mentally I just found myself unable to get it together. At the first turnaround I was apparently 32nd overall. I caught up to the lead female and then had the secondary lead female overtake both of us.
As more and more marathoners passed me, I saw my place slipping farther and farther down the rankings. In my head I wanted to keep myself in the top 40 as the Race Director said there were 4000 people registered for the marathon. That would make me a one percenter. I don’t know why this mattered to me. I saw a great shirt sported by a fellow runner. It had this quote purportedly from Albert Einstein printed on it:
Not everything that can be counted counts; not everything that counts can be counted.
Note: A quick google search says this should perhaps be attributed to William Bruce Cameron and not Einstein. If the internet is to be believed, it’s one of the top nine quotes from Einstein that are apparently totally fake.
Still, it’s a good quote and I have never let truth get in the way of a good quote.
With the pain and hazy focus and slipping place, I didn’t take a lot of photos in the back half of the marathon. Well, that and my iPhone really didn’t like my sweaty fingers trying to swipe open the camera or key in my passcode to get to the apps. I missed at least three AMAZING photos because I couldn’t get the damn thing to transform into a camera. I don’t know which part of the axiom above those lost photos apply to but I do know they would’ve looked great here in this post.
The wind kicked up in the closing miles which also contributed to a slowed pace. You can tell as my pompadour is all flipped to one side in these shots.
In the end, I wound up with a 3:21 and was 38th overall. A year ago that would’ve made me ecstatic but a lot has changed in the past 12 months. I’ve qualified for Boston, hit a PR, and since that happened this is the first race I thought to myself, “I’m really going to go for it today….” As I said, I usually wing it and just kinda hope to keep my running within certain parameters — I try my best to keep it under 4 hours and ideally I aim for a 3:30-ish or so. But like Babe Ruth, I called my shot today; unlike Babe Ruth, I didn’t make it happen.
And so I have a weird sense of… failure? Of regret? Which is crazy as I did pretty well all things considered. But it’s my “all things considered” caveat that I think makes it feel like a successful failure. Excuses are just that: excuses. The long and the short of the 26.2 miles today is that I didn’t do what I set out to do. And that’s a bit of a bummer.
On the plus side, here are a few post-race shots wherein I embraced my Blue Shirted Star Trek attire. Was I going Vulcan science office or curmudgeonly lovable country doctor? A bit of both perhaps, a bit of both….
By the way — the inflatable shuttle? It’s the Enterprise.
To boldly run where I have run before…
Run long and prosper…
And perhaps most important of all… Captain’s Log: Supplemental. My back is killing me. We’ve run out of Romulan Ale so I’m into the Sangria and Aleve. Mr. Scott — We’ll be going to Warp (and Wine) Factor 8.
