Were Three Kisses too Much? Boston Marathon Report

Yet another Boston report… I am a very slow writer… no wonder I have not finished writing my dissertation…

My 2007 Philly 3:20:17 and my 2008 Boston 3:29 qualified me for running Boston for a third time in a row. However in mid January I was still undecided about running it due to a number of reasons that I won’t mention here. I actually never did decide by myself, but a scare on the Boston website stating that the race was closed - that happened to be a false alarm - prompted me to register. A couple of days after I registered the race closed…

I put together some Higdon ideas and ended running 238 miles in Feb and 296 miles in March with a peak week of 82 miles 4 weeks before Boston. These monthly and peak mileages were super PRs for me since in past training cycles I had not run any more than 60-65 miles tops. However, 5 weeks out I started having issues with my left calf and I never really recovered from them. The weeks following my peak were mostly done on the elliptical. It was a strange 4 week taper.

The week before Boston I had to be in conference in San Diego. Got home Friday 7 pm and my plane to Philadelphia left Saturday 7 am. I took a bus from Philly to NYC and go to my relatives place around 7 pm on Saturday. Sunday I took another bus from NYC to Boston, went to the expo, then to the pasta dinner and got to my hotel around 6 pm. It sounds and in fact it was a LOT of traveling…

My A goal was to run a sub 3:20 for a PR. Being unsure about how my calf would respond I started the race conservatively. I don’t own a Garmin so I wear a simple watch on my right hand for the overall time and check my splits with another simple watch on my left hand. The first mile was 7:50 and was the slowest of the next 10-11. At mile 6 I tried to pick up the pace a bit but my left hammy complained so I backed off. My fastest mile was in this section was 7:38. When I got to Natick I gave a lot of high - and low - fives and had a lot of fun.
 
When I heard the Wellesley tunnel I reminded myself that unlike last year when I indulged myself kissing a girl I would stay on the center of the road. However, suddenly for some strange reason I found myself turning my head to see if I could squeeze to the right…and I did. There it was the first kiss… then the second…then the third…oh boy…I ended having an 8:10 split on that mile…

I thought I got to the halfway point in 1:41 but looking at official splits it was actually 1:42.  I thought I could try harder on the second half and still have a chance for my PR. I felt pretty strong at that point. At the hills my mile splits definitely slowed down but I did not feel as bad as I did in 08.  I was passing some runners unlike last year when everybody was passing me. But I did slow down. I saw I couple of 8:50-9:00 splits…

When I had run for 2:30 hrs I started doing “math” – I never did look at my wrist pace band-  and I figured that my PR was gone and that I still had a chance to BQ if I ran 8 minute miles. It turned out that my “math” was wrong as I was counting on 26 miles not 26.2… I felt the wind on this stretch and my splits never went below 8:05…my right foot went asleep – I had never experimented that before- my left calf started feeling funny, my right quad was screaming and I started losing my stride. When I got to the 40k point I realized that my BQ (3:30:59) was definitely gone. I just completely dropped my pace at that point and it took me 13 minutes to do the last 2k…to end with a 3:34:56

So were 3 kisses too much? I don’t know. But I did have a lot of fun!

What did I learn/what is next?

1. Boston is a lot of fun.
2. I think the increase in mileage did benefit me.
3. I think my calf issues came from abusing hill training.
4. I would like to run Andy Payne in Oklahoma City on 5/23 and Maryville, MO on 6/13 to become a Marathon Maniac just for the fun of it.
5. This could happen only if my left ITB, which was sore after Boston, is healthy enough…  

Thanks for reading.

Jorge Carvajal