I ran my first marathon today, on a chilly fall morning in Hartford, Conn. The race started in front of the State Capitol, looped around the city and then through the surrounding East Windsor countryside, and finished back in Hartford beneath the stone archway of Bushnell Park. I placed 16th with a time of 2:47:19 (full results).
I ran a lot faster than I expected. My goal was to simply qualify for the Boston Marathon by finishing within 3 hours and 11 minutes. But I got swept up in the excitement and, instead of holding an easy pace in the beginning, I ran with the top female racer for the first 10 miles. While I’d planned to run 7-minute pace overall, I was running a full minute faster per mile at nearly 6-minute pace. Recipe for disaster.
Somehow, I was able to hold on during the tough middle miles (when the top female slowly pulled away from me, eventually finishing in 2:41:06) and hang on for dear life to the end (when the second-place woman passed me), despite crashing through a series of waves of exhaustion. Every two miles, it seemed, my brain fogged over and my body grew numb; I’d push through the pain, and emerge slightly weaker but still running.
By end of the race, my body was covered in chunks of white salt, highlighting how low my sodium level had plummeted as I burned through electrolytes. I was brushing off the salt from my skin with my hand. There seemed enough to flavor a steak. And now I’m planning to do it all over again in April at the Boston Marathon.
