It has been 124 days since I ran my first marathon (BMO Vancouver Marathon). I realize that is a ridiculously long time to wait before writing a race report, but what can I say? It has been a summer full of unexpected twists and turns that have distracted me from finally doing this. Now, exactly once month out from Marathon #2, I feel like I have both the perspective and the motivation to record these thoughts before they get muddled with another race. And away we go…
The weeks leading up to May 3 did not go completely according to plan. After my last super-long training run on April 5 I started experiencing pretty bad pain on the outside of my right foot, towards my heel. I went to a physio clinic where a doctor specializing in sports medicine (and coincidentally training for the same race) told me that it was an overuse injury that was aggravated my landing too far towards the outside of my foot and possibly too far forward. He gave me some exercises to do and told me to hit the gym for some low-impact activities to keep my fitness up while I let my foot recover.
I think I did the exercises once, but I went to the gym for the first few weeks of April in lieu of running. My plan was just to give my body as much recovery time as possible before kicking off race season. Two weeks out from the marathon the rest appeared to be paying off when I ran a person best of 44:42 at the Vancouver Sun Run 10K, but I was concerned afterwords as my foot pain had seemingly returned full force. I did only 3 short runs in the two weeks that followed and crossed my fingers for the marathon.
My training buddies and I.
May 3 rolled around with perfect weather. The morning was cool and I wore a sweater over my Under Armour sleeveless shirt on the shuttle to the start line. I met up with my training partners as we all nervously stretched before lining up. I remember doing my best to stay off my feet, still leery of stressing my injured foot. Eventually we headed to the corals and worked our way up towards the start line as the national anthem played and no one paid attention.
The first few kilometers were great. The excitement off all the other runners and the novelty of being part of an organized race (only my third at any distance since high school) spurred me out to a strong pace. Up until the moment the gun went off my plan had been to try to break 3:40. Based on my long runs I felt I could do it. However, at the expo where we picked up our race packs I met the founder of the Running Room, who after hearing my finishing times at 10K and 21.1K told me to shoot for 3:30. I thought that seemed ambitious but as the kilometers ticked away and I rode a 5:00/km pace, I began to revise my plan.
I caught up to the 3:30 pace runner about 5K into the race and ran along with him at what in hindsight should have seemed too quick of a pace. It turned out his plan was to bank a few minutes early in the race and cut the pace towards the end. we ran down 49th street towards the major climbing section of the course and the idea of banking a few minutes before the hill up to UBC seemed to make sense. I pulled ahead of the 3:30 pacer, ticking off km’s 5, 6 and 7 at a 4:34 pace (I’m an idiot).
As expected, the hills up to UBC, particularly the infamous Camosun Street hill ate into my time. Kilometer 10 took 5:27, but I wasn’t worried. I settled back into a comfortable pace just under 5:00/km and began to feel like breaking 3:30 was all but inevitable. I even made friends with a girl running at roughly my pace and trying to break 3:35 to qualify for Boston and told her to stick with me. However, by the half-marathon mark, cracks in the armor were beginning to show. The most damning evidence against my ambitious new goal came as I set a new half-marathon PB in the first half of my first full marathon.
As I ran by the clock at the half marathon point, though, I didn’t even realize I had set a new PB. I was beginning to feel tired and struggled to take in a gel, but things were going alright. That is, until kilometer 24.
In the lead up to the race I had tried to run every step of the route on my various training runs and I had largely succeeded, with one exception. On a long run, my training partner and I had attempted the Jericho Beach section but got mixed up and ended up skipping a 1.5K section. It turned out we had missed the second steepest hill on the course, and for that mistake I would pay. I chugged up the unexpected hill and made the turn onto 4th Ave, but in trying to maintain my pace I had burned through too much energy.
The wall came at kilometer 27, almost exactly. I was running down 4th towards the section of the course I was the most familiar with, having run it more than a dozen times on lunch breaks at work, but the roads looked completely foreign. Each slight hill was an unwelcome and soul-crushing shock to my system. All at once, I had had enough and needed to take a walking break to recollect myself.
I struggled, walking and running in spurts to Kits point where I refilled my handheld water bottle at an aid station. As I screwed the top on, the first of my two running partners who I had started the race with caught up. I ran with him for probably 500 meters before I just couldn’t keep up. I wished him well and went back to my misery.
I had been looking forward to the Burrard Bridge before the race, having trained on it with a lot of success on both short and long runs, but I couldn’t make it to the top without walking. My other running buddy caught me on the bridge and tried to motivate me by pushing be up the hill, but I had to tell him I just couldn’t do it. At this point I would be lucky to break 4 hours at the finish line.
Dying on the downhill side of the Burrard Bridge.
I made it to the apex of the bridge and used the downhill grade to get back into a running pace before I made it to the aid station at kilometer 31. Up until that point the aid stations had provided water and some sports drink and occasionally gels, but this one was different. I weaved through a sea of runners and out of the crowd, seemingly in a spotlight from heaven, arose a table with bananas. I devoured my first piece of real food in hours and almost instantly was a changed man. I threw the peel in the trash and fixed my gaze on Stanley Park and the Seawall. My last chance to own this race.
With my sugar stores replenished, I could think more clearly, so think I did
. Rational thought produced a solid plan. Based on the time I had left, I worked out that I could afford to walk the first 100 meters of each kilometer and still break 3 hours and 50 minutes if I ran the rest at a pace around 5:45/km. With the ocean on my left and the forest on my right, I stuck to the plan religiously and was amazed how good I felt. My pace was steady around the park as other runners began to lose steam. I passed countless other warriors including my two training partners before rounding the final bend, in site of downtown.
Smiling, somehow.
My wife, fresh of completing the half marathon, waited at kilometer 40 with our camera where, amazingly, she caught a picture of me smiling. I ran past the 41 km marker where I briefly considered the last 1.2K to be humanly impossible before getting back to work.
Cruelly, as you make the last turn and get a glimpse of the finish line, Georgia Street rears up in an ugly and demoralizing hill that, again, forced me to walk. It was only when I saw the clock, siting at 3:48:00 that I got my sense of urgency back. With every last morsel of my strength I sprinted, or more accurately shuffled, towards the finish line. When I made it through in 3:49:02 my legs nearly gave out.
Don’t believe the clock, official time was 3:49:02.
I grabbed all the food I could get my hands on and collapsed against the fence in the finisher’s area. Eventually I found myself laying flat on my back on Pender Street, ignoring my regularly vegetarian diet and gorging on a turkey sandwich (the best of my life) the next human voice I could make sense of came from another runner, also sprawled in the middle of the street, telling my my head was on his banana. We laughed and congratulated each other for a while before I told him I had to meet my wife 2 blocks away at the Olympic Cauldron. Agreeing that I would probably die on the way, we said our goodbyes and I limped my way o
ut of the fenced area.
I met up with Marianne and we snapped a few pictures of each of us with our medals before making a new friend (a half marathon finisher) and deciding to use the free beer coupons that came in our race packages to get drinks at a pub nearby. We ate and laughed and had a great time.
The “sprint” to the finish.
Spent.
Victory pose with the wife.
Best lunch ever.
It was the hardest and most worth-it thing I’ve ever done.
Yelling at the Moon 
