I am a marathoner!

I finally did it! I am officially part of the Marathon Club, albeit the slow Marathon Club :)  My finishing time was well below my expectations but I am happy (and proud) to have made it across the finish line.

When I signed up for the race back in November 2010, I had set my finish time at 4:30. As I was training for the marathon, I was feeling pretty optimistic of even pulling a 4:15-4:20 and race day excitement even had me thinking of clocking in under 4 hours! So it was a bittersweet moment as I stumbled across the finish line, some 4 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds later, having done one of the most physically enduring things in my life.
In hindsight, choosing a race with 1600 feet of elevation gain was probably a bad idea for a first marathon. But on the bright side, beating this time should be fairly easy in the next one :) ( Eugene 2012 anyone !?!)

I can almost divide the race into 2 sections - the first 19 miles and the last 7 miles.
Here are my official splits:

0:30:05: 5 Km
0:59:27: 10 Km
1:27:33: 9 Miles
 2:08:41: Half (13.1)
 3:11:39: 30 Km
 4:23:18: 24 Miles
 4:52:59: Full

Looking at this, I was pretty much on track to come under 4:30 at the half-way point. I had paced myself really well and felt pretty good about hitting my goal time. If you do the math, I did the second half in 2 hours, 44 minutes! And looking at my Garmin data, I did the last 7 miles (from Mile 20-Finish) in 1 hour and 40 minutes, at a whopping 14 min/mile!  I'll give you one shot to guess where I hit the "wall". Here's another hint...it took me 18 freakin minutes to go from Mile 19- Mile 20 ;-(

I guess there's some element of  truth to the following :
" Anyone can run 20 miles, it's the next 6 that count!"

Overall, it was a heck of an experience! And congratulations to all my running buddies, Yelena, Chris and Stacey, with all of us accomplishing what we had set out to do!

4 days to go!

Actually, less than that. By this time on the 4th day, I should ideally be past the halfway mark :)  But yeah, if you have talked to me recently, you'll know that I am just about ready to get this over with.

After 6 months of training, logging in ~440 miles and 70+ hours of running, I am finally ready to tame this beast!
I head out to Seattle on Thursday evening after work, will hit the expo on Friday morning to collect my t-shirt/bib no. and then probably not sleep on Friday night and then crash and burn on Saturday morning. That's the worst case scenario. Or one of the many worst case scenarios that have been going on in my head over the last couple of days.
Nervousness aside, I feel pretty confident, though the enormity of the event probably won't hit me till Saturday morning when I am standing in my corral . And it'll be too late to chicken out at that point, so I am just going to go and run the race anyway. That't the plan.

In the meantime, I'll continue to look at cheesy motivational videos on YouTube to remind me why I signed up for this 8 months back and to keep me from going mad over the next couple of days.

And talking about videos, found a pretty cool video on Last Minute Marathon Tips on YouTube: