Los Angeles Marathon
Saturday morning I woke up nice and early and went to 24 Hour Fitness for a swim. It was a beautiful morning and I felt great. My hip was just barely bothering me and I wasn’t really feeling Friday’s long swim. When I got there, I had the pool just about to myself, but over the course of my swim, it gradually filled up. For most of my main set (which consisted of 9×300 with some recovery kicking after the fourth and seventh 300), there were good swimmers in the lanes on either side of me. The guy on my left was slightly faster than my goal pace and the guy on my right was slightly slower, but they were both close enough that I was able to “race” them and stay really motivated, which helped the most during the seventh and eighth 300. I had thought about trying to convert the training plan from yards to meters, but decided, again to roll with the longer pool and just do a longer swim. I felt the added distance on pretty much every 300. Swimming in an outdoor pool was great – feeling the sun on my back and seeing the sky and trees during breaths makes for such a different experience than being in the basement of the gym!
After my swim, Mom, Dad and I drove to Santa Monica and went for a nice walk along the beach. Then Loren met up with us and we had a great brunch at Border Grill. Elizabeth spent the day shopping with her Mom. Saturday night, we went to a little Thai place a couple blocks from the hotel. After dinner, Emily came and met us at the hotel and we got all prepped for the big marathon day. She was sleeping over at the hotel so we could drive her up to Universal Studios for the start on Sunday morning.
At 6AM on Sunday the alarm went off and all three of us popped up and started getting ready. Emily was nervous, but excited. Elizabeth and my plan was to get her to the start and wait with her until she was ready to line up, at which point we were going to drive down to mile 5 and cheer her on from there. I was planning on running bits and pieces of the race with her, depending on how my hip felt. My first assignment started at mile 10. From there, I ended up run/walking with her until mile 18, which was farther than I’d planned, but I could tell I was helping her and amazingly, my hip didn’t bother me at all. At mile 18, two of her other friends jumped in and were going to take her for the rest. We drove to the finish, where I left Elizabeth and their friend John to wait at the end, and I ran a couple miles to cut Emily off at mile 23 or 24. That was the only part of the day that I ran somewhat hard, and I have to say that I could feel that running in my hip. It wasn’t bad, but I could feel it and any lateral movement or hopping onto a curb was worse. I met up with them at mile 24 and we ran with Emily until we got kicked off the course right after the mile 26 marker. She did great. Elizabeth was such a good sport. She was bummed that after all the training, her knee kept her from doing the race. And watching Emily run it could not have been easy, but she was so supportive and genuinely happy for Emily. It really made me feel good. And Emily wrote us today that she’s all fired up to do another one – this time with Elizabeth! Elizabeth’s going to have to be careful and take it easy on her knee, but there’s no question that she can do it. Hopefully they’ll get into New York. I’d love to watch and support them through that race.
Here are some pictures from the day:
Pre-race me and Elizabeth
Pre-race Elizabeth and Emily
Emily’s cheering crew mid-race
Emily’s support crew minus Elizabeth
Post-race Elizabeth and Emily
Running yesterday was a blast. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Way too hot for a competitive marathon, but for me, it was perfect. And running at Emily’s pace (average around 13:30’s), I could really enjoy myself and look around and smile and cheer, things I didn’t do in New York. I couldn’t even begin to compare it to running New York. Also, I have to say that the LA Marathon itself was a little disappointing. Around 26,000 people raced yesterday, supposedly making it the world’s seventh largest marathon. I will admit that I was totally spoiled by New York, but a bunch of things about this marathon seemed JV – from the simple, like the race packet, which didn’t contain good maps or a clear spectator’s guide to the mess at the start, which wasn’t nearly as well organized as New York (the portapotties weren’t laid out very well, the space wasn’t really big enough for the number of people there, there wasn’t very good signage) to the course, which was pretty lame (I don’t know LA all that well, and this was a new course, but it had a ton of turns and went through a bunch of dead neighborhoods where there literally weren’t any fans for blocks at a time; I just think they could have done better and if this was an improvement over the prior course, I’d hate to imagine what that was like). On the good side, they did have plenty of water and Gatorade and good on-course support (I saw a bunch of people being tended to by the medics) and in some neighborhoods, especially the ones that would probably be considered less “nice,” there was good crowd support. As I said, New York totally spoiled me, but this is LA, and I expected more.
After the race, we went back to the hotel and relaxed for a while before going to dinner with the Shaffer clan. I was in bed and passed out before 10PM.
Today was a travel day – spending all day on the plane pretty much blows. I was worried that my hip/groin would be aching this morning, but it was totally fine. It still feels just a little bit tight, but I think (and really really hope) that it’s finally just about there. On Friday I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Metzl for tomorrow, but I cancelled it this morning. Tomorrow’s going to be a crazy enough day and with my leg feeling better, I’d prefer to see how it feels this week and after I get a couple runs in to decide if I need to go in. Two friggin’ weeks, all because I wanted to put a couple more miles on the bike.
All in all, it was a fantastic weekend.
Swim – March 3
Distance: 3,900 yards (3,600 meters)
Time: 1:16
Run – March 4
Distance: 12.5 miles, split into three pieces at a run-walk (8 miles, 2.5 miles, 2 miles)
Time: 2:35
Course: LA Marathon
Conditions: Hot, sunny, too hot for a good marathon (mid-70’s to low 80’s) but it felt great on Sunday!