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!