Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Cruisin' in the Hamptons

posted by lizzie    « No Comments »    tied to Uncategorized   

It rained a lot. We got really wet. Our feet were really wet. But the rain wasn’t as bothersome as I thought it would be, and it might have been for the best because it kept our muscles cooler. We planned to stick with a pace group, and we were within sight of the 3:40 runners for the first 14 miles, but then they got new pacers (the pacers only run half the marathon and then they switch fresh legs in) and the 3:40 got out of sight, and then the 3:45, and then the 3:50. Hahaha. So much for that. I knew from the beginning that there was no way I was going to be able to keep up, although I had hoped to at least keep the 3:50 group close. I sort of hit the wall early on (mile 10), but it wasn’t too bad. Mostly I just thought they were putting the miles signs really far apart and it was annoying. :) But that only lasted until mile 16 or 17 and then I started feeling like I could handle it. It wasn’t until about mile 20 that they fixed the problem with the mile signs, but then they got out of sync again for the last mile or two. Both of us started to get really tight the last few miles but by then we thought it wouldn’t be worth stopping to stretch so we just kept running. And I think it ended as well as we could have hoped for. We ran the whole way. We didn’t stop for anything, and we ended up with an overall pace of just a hair under 9:00 minute miles. Like 8:59:02 or something like that. Which means that we made our goal of under 4 hours. We crossed the line with five minutes to spare at 3:55:25. Our net time (the time from when we crossed the start line to when we crossed the finish line) was 3:55:09. And oddly enough, we both placed in our age groups. I got 2nd in mine and Micah got 3rd in his. We had no idea, so we missed the award ceremony. They tell us they are going to send our prizes in the mail. I’m so curious about what they are. I should mention that there were only 300 people to finish the race in less than 6 hours and apparently there are not many 20-30 year-olds who run marathons in the Hamptons on rainy Saturdays in September.
We went with our friends Carrie and Erik Dalzen. Carrie was the one who persuaded us to run and Erik was kind enough to watch Simon and take pictures of us at the finish line. I am really pleased with how the whole race turned out. I’m so glad we paced ourselves well enough that we could run the whole way and that we reached our goal. But I am not ready to be excited about the next one. I’m sure that in time we’ll forget that running a marathon kind of hurts and we’ll do it again. Until then, I think we’re going to get into the 5K and 10K scene a little bit more. Maybe run a half or two. That sounds like fun.

Hint: people who leave the first comment are cooler.

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