Another Marathon Down 4:55
I ran my second Marine Corps Marathon today on a cool and blustery day. I had a great race and beat my first marathon time by 12 minutes. I was hoping for a little better, but it was a tougher course this year with an extra set of hills thrown in due to construction on the Rock Creek Parkway. And this happens to also be Al Gore’s finish time when he ran this race in 1997…so I have some good company I guess!
Speaking of Al Gore, someone had a shirt on that read “Beat George W – 3:44:52″ which was a reference to his marathon finish time for a past race.
The race seemed to go a lot faster this year from a mental perspective. I don’t know why as my time was not that much faster, but the run down to Hains Point did not take as long “mentally” and even the 14th street bridge seemed to fly by faster than I remember. I was closing in on the finish and barely had one of those, “I want it to be over” moments. However, at mile 25 I did want it to be over :-)
I ran (run/walk 5:1) the entire race until I got to mile 23 or so. Then I started taking more breaks but was still able to run 11 min/mile for solid chunks of time. Overall I ran an average pace of 11:25 which is about a half minute faster than last year. And I actually had a reasonably fast half marathon time of about 2:20. Not bad.
The winner this year was some guy from Ethopia who managed a 2:22 time. Ruben Garcia who won the race for the past two years finished second about 2 minutes behind. They were neck and enck at mile 22!
As usual, the Marine Corps did a flawless job with the race. Everything seemed perfect from the course to the aid stations to the celebration at the end. I tip my hats to these guys for the race and more importantly, everything they do for us where it really counts. Semper Fi and one big Oorah!
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Way to go Carl! Is that Gender Place for real? 8888
Sounds spooky. You have just a few more runners to keep you company than I did last weekend. Time for you to do a 50K.
8888 must be for real out of 30,000+ runners….well I guess maybe half of those are male?
Yes, it is a different kind of race than what you normally get involved with, but its fun running through the monuments and neighborhoods of out nations capital. Especially on such a nice day.
I kinda want to do a 50K, but I am so dead after 26 miles I am not sure how I could manage another 9 or 10. I guess with training anything is possible, but not sure I want to do it. Got to want to, right?
Thanks, Davy.
Forget the 50K. Get a bike and swimsuit and register for Reston Triathlon next fall. ;)
Seriously, though, nice finish.