10.10.10 - Gene's Perspective

A post-race email from Gene to his running buddies. His overall finish time was 4:26.

Preparing for a marathon doesn’t end with the training and the weekend was too busy for Katie, Tyler and I. We flew in Friday morning, checked in, got to downtown, ate, and went to the expo. Seems easy enough, but it zapped the energy out of us. We then met up with an old high school friend on Friday night and dinner took a long time so we got to bed late. Saturday, I went on the morning jog with the Leukemia team that I’ve been raising money for and toured the starting/finishing area. We then went to an early lunch that took a long time again with some good friends that live in Michigan. After we walked to a park and hung around for a little bit. I think I should have had better communication with my wife and friends to keep things simple and not too much walking. I knew I needed to be sitting down in A/C and not walking around a park the day before 26.2. It’s kind of hard to balance combining the marathon with seeing good old friends.

I meant to send out an email to my running buds, but with having a 7 week old and everything else, time really flew during the weekend. I spent a lot of time Sat night figuring out how to get a shower, etc since we would need to check out of the hotel before I got back. I apologize about it – I know some of you got an email and were able to track me.

Before the weekend, I was fretting over how fast I should run because it was going to be colder weather in Chicago. Ha! The day starting in the high 60s and went to the 80s pretty quickly. I wasn’t too concerned about the weather since I knew I was prepared to run in the heat – it’s just I couldn’t run as fast as I could in the cold. Runkeeper was having issues tracking me since we went through a couple tunnels and with the high skyscrapers it didn’t have the best approximation of time/distance. I haven’t looked at my garmin data yet, but based on the garmin during the race and the Chicago website, I ran a consistent 10 min mile through the whole race. I had enough energy at the end that I sprinted for the last half mile (including the sole/larger hill in the race).

For me the marathon was longer than 2 halfs. It was mentally challenging to pace yourself and know you still have a lot of miles in front of you. I prefer to run straight through and was glad that with the exception to refill my camelback a couple times I ran straight through. I’m not sure if I hit the wall or if I was too focused on finishing because my splits didn’t drastically change. They were maybe 30 seconds per min slower in some of the later miles, but like I said before, I still had energy to sprint during the last half mile. I ate 6 GUs, drank Gatorade here and there and maybe that help me avoid the wall.

The course was much more crowded than San Antonio, white rock, cowtown halfs. I spent a decent amount of time dodging people and going around them. I should have been closer to the front of the open corral, but I wasn’t and believe I paid the price by moving around people. There were many people in the last 6-8 miles that were walking. Pretty much at every water stop it seemed like 66% of the people were walking!

Chicago did an awesome job with coordinating the logistics. I would say it was by far the smoothest race I ran logistically. They really had their act together and had small things covered. I think the only thing lacking vs other races was the post race food wasn’t anything special. I think they had bananas and some chips! Whoopie. Cowtown had ice cream and chicken noodle soup – yum!

The crowd support was fantastic. My headphones died a couple miles into the race – I HATE apple headphones! Therefore, I had no choice but to listen to everything else and it was amazing how well supported the race was. For most of the course there were always fan support. In some areas they were going crazy and I loved it. I also appreciated the people praying for me. I knew there were many praying for me during the race and the sense of peace knowing those prayers were being answered in that I was still running after 4 hours straight! Having my wife there was awesome too. Even though we never saw each other, having your wife there in support of something as large as a first time marathon is huge!

I’m very pleased that I finished. I know that I can put together a better marathon time, but, really, this race wasn’t as much about my time as it was everything else. Raising money for blood cancers, running it in honor of my friends with blood cancers, completing a goal that I didn’t think I would ever try/do 1.3 years ago, and working though the struggles just to get to the starting line (injuries, time, financial, etc.). Worth every second of it!

My 2 cents…

-gene
P.S. – I did beat Oprah’s time!