June 13, 2011

Some post-marathon analysis

I'm 48 hours post-marathon, and other than a blistered toe, my body feels great! Its actually quite surprising that I've been able to bounce back so quick. After the Antelope Island 50K, I felt like crap for about a week.

The fact that I wasn't even sore the day after the race obviously made me question whether I had run hard enough. Now, I'm not going to really second guess a 2:21 marathon... I'm extremely happy about UVM! However, you can learn something from every race, so I'm already thinking about how I'm going to make the jump to the next level.

I'll save the in-depth analysis for another blog, or maybe just save it for long run conversations with Andrea so I don't bore the readers of this site to death, but I did a little breakdown of splits this morning that I think is interesting...

I took my mile splits and compared them to Paul Peterson's splits, who finished 2nd on Saturday, running his 3rd straight sub 2:20 marathon. We ran together for the first 6 miles, before he pulled away and chased down the leaders. He ended up finishing 2 minutes and 17 seconds ahead of me, and I wanted to see at what point during the race I lost that time to him.



After Paul put a small gap on me during the 7th mile, I actually made up some time on mile 8-9, which were primarily uphill and pretty difficult. At mile 10 Paul caught the leaders and obviously that spiced things up a bit up front, and they started flying. From 10-19 is where they really pulled away, except for miles 12 and 16, which had big hills. Over the last 10K, I actually ran fairly close to what Paul ran.

So, the positives from this are that I ran the harder uphills very well and closed strong for the last 10K. I'm much stronger on uphills than downhills... so that is something I need to work on... but I'm glad that its not the other way around. The middle part of the race will come with more training and experience. It would not have been wise to try and match Paul's acceleration after the 6th mile... I may have been able to hang for a while, but it absolutely would have come back to bite me later on. I'm happy that I was smart enough to let him go and focus on running my own race, and running negative splits.

If you saw the video of my finish, its clear that I had something left in the tank at the end. That is another good sign.

Its going to take a lot of work to get to where I want to be. Not months of consistency, but years. This was only step one, but it was a BIG step in the right direction.


Epsom salt foot baths were part of the weekend recovery process


I love my Saucony Type A3s, and will be wearing them for lots more (shorter) races, but I can't afford to let this happen again in another marathon.

1 comment:

  1. Concur on the consistency thing. The key is years of injury-free, consistent running. Get out there every day, but remember to give yourself some easy downtime running after the big efforts.

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