Tucson Marathon Today - There's No Fooling This Body
Sunday, December 12, 2010 at 10:48PM 
29th marathon down the hatch. The good news is that I finished today's Tucson Marathon. Around mile 17 I was having some doubts.
I digress. Two weeks ago I decided to sign up for ANOTHER marathon, 2 weeks after the Malibu Marathon. This was kind of an experiment to see how many body would respond so soon after the last marathon. My hope was to run a sub 3 hour marathon.
Today's 26.2 miler was basically 2 runs. The first half of the marathon I ran in 1 hour, 27 minutes and felt just fine. That feeling lasted until about mile 15, at which point I noticed my quads could no longer respond.
By mile 17, my quads were TRASHED and I started alternating walking and running. And so it went for the next 4 miles...walk 20 steps, run as best I could. Around mile 21 I was able to take in more fluids, namely a sports drink called "Xood" that the race was serving up, and I was able to regain some composure with a slow paced "death shuffle" to the finish.
Yup, it was one of those days. The weather was fairly warm and dry and once again I wasn't getting enough fluids in. But while that did impact my running, I'm not going to kid myself. I did not do the base mileage homework for this marathon, and there's no fooling your body into running a fast marathon. But I enjoyed trying, as painful as it was.
I was also happy that I ran a very comfortable 1:27 half marathon over the first half of the course. I was running at a moderate effort.
Overall my time was 3 hours, 14 minutes. Talk about crash and burn! 1:27 1st half vs 1:47 2nd half.
Time to recuperate...and think about 2011.
Reader Comments (1)
Joe,
I ran Santa Barbara last year and since then I have looked at your blog. Sorry to hear that Tucson did not go well. But I guess running marathons so close to each other is tricky and not optimal for the best performance.
I actually had a question regarding you mentioning having your quads trashed early during the race. Do you think that is because the course is a strong downhill and that you did not prepared specifically for this ? Or was it just because you did not recover from Malibu ?
Anyhow, congratulations even if 3:17 was a subpar performance for you !