Tucson Marathon Today - There's No Fooling This Body

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.