My Running History part 4 (2006 MCM/2007LPRM)

I finished Boston in 3:43 due to excessive heat. I had yet to run a true Boston qualifying time. But my long distance running went on hold. My wife and I were trying for kid #3 and long distance running may not be the best for fertility. Anyway, for the rest of 2004 and, indeed, 2005, I went back to my 20-30 miles per week of running only during lunch during the week, no long runs on the weekends. In fact, I only ran 2 other races in 2004 — a 10K in October and a 5 miler in December (the Manatee River Run in Sarasota, Florida, where I won my first age group award — 1st place in the 35-39 category). In May 2005, I started running the Tidal Basin 3Ks as an outlet for racing. But even then, I only ran 5 races in 2005 — 2 3Ks, 2 10Ks, and an 8K. My total yearly mileage was also way down — 1042.4 miles in 2004 (mostly thanks to my Boston training) and only 916.62 in 2005.

In the spring 2006 (about a year after kid #3 was born), my wife decided she was ready to try another marathon. She signed up for the First Time Marathon program again to train for the 2006 Marine Corps Marathon and I decided to run as well, although training on my own. My goal was to run that elusive Boston qualifying time (3:15). My training that summer went pretty well. Come race day, I felt very strong and ran a 3:12:12 (coming in 310th out of 20,912 finishers, that’s top 1.5% for the mathematically challenged). Wow! I blew threw the Boston time. At last, I felt like I deserved that Boston run. Anyhow, having qualified I simply had to run Boston again. More importantly, I felt so strong at the finish that I first thought that running a sub 3 hour marathon was within the realm of possibilities.

I had run a strong 3:12 in the 2006 Marine Corps Marathon. That was an honest-to-goodness Boston qualifying time so of course I signed up to run the 2007 Boston Marathon. I also began to believe that perhaps I had a sub-3 hour marathon in me. A friend at work who I run Tidal Basin 3Ks with suggested I try a local marathon he’d run the year before, Lower Potomac River Marathon. LPRM was the first week of March 2007, about 7 weeks before Boston, so I figured that would be adequate recovery time. I started training for LPRM in December. For the first time, I introduced speedwork to my training (I had downloaded a training program from Runners World.com which included alternating speedwork and tempo runs, neither of which I had done in my previous 3 marathons).

Race day for LPRM arrived. The course is a beautiful low-key marathon in southern St. Mary’s County, MD. The first half was awesome. We ran along the Potomac River with wonderful sunrise vista and around St. George’s Island and the Piney Point Lighthouse. My pace was on track for a sub-3 hour run. Like I said, the first half was awesome. The second half was an out-and-back on the shoulder of a thankfully not too busy county road. Unfortunately, it was a net uphill 7 mile climb into a mild 10 mile per hour or so headwind. The most memorable line was at the turnaround where the course marshal instructed me to “cross when it’s safe.” Cross when it’s safe? That was it? I waited for a few cars and then crossed to the other side. Unfortunately, the uphills into the wind had depleted much of my reserves and my pace started creeping up. At around mile 23 my overall pace went above the 3 hour pace, but I didn’t have anything in me to get the pace back down. This was the first marathon I had run with my new GPS watch. I learned the hard way that I should not have tried to maintain a constant pace up those hills. Rather, I should have run at constant effort and then used the downhills and tailwind to make up lost pace. Still, I was able to pass two or three more runners in the final 5K (the nice thing about marathon running is no matter how bad you feel, most likely everyone else feels the same!!). I did not break 3 hours but I did finish with a marathon PR – 3:03:54 and placed 6th overall (out of 177 runners) and won the master’s division (over 40 crowd). So I was thrilled.

I took a week off to recover and then resumed training for Boston.