For those who keep track of these things, here are my Garmin splits from the marathon. They actually tell the story fairly well.
Mile 1 - 10:35
Mile 2 - 10:25
Mile 3 - 10:14
Miles 4 and 5 - 9:54 I turn to pace leader and say, "Ummm, we're running negative splits! He's unphased, but it freaks me out
Mile 6 - 10:59 I drop off from the 4:30 pace group
Mile 7 and 8 - 10:46
Mile 9 - 10:39
Mile 10 - 10:13
Mile 11 - 11:44 The half marathoners break off and turn around, which is pretty depressing. Carson street suddenly looks like a ghost town.
Mile 12 - 13:33 Bathroom break in Oakland at the top of the hill. I wish I knew how much time I lost on the hill, since I lost *at least* a minute in the porta potty.
Mile 13 and 14 - 10:33 Obviously I did well through Oakland and Shadyside. If I'd looked at my watch and actually seen the average, it might have encouraged me to keep the pace up a bit more.
Mile 15 - 11:52
Mile 16 - 11:25
Mile 17 - 11:44
Mile 18 - 11:36
Mile 19 - 11:13
Mile 20 and 21 - 11:06
Mile 22 - 12:32 Totally losing steam here. I think a lot of this was going up Liberty so we could do the final downhill
Mile 23 - 10:43 And Haakan appears!
Mile 24 - 12:06
Mile 25 - 11:20
Mile 26 - 11:10
Final .2 - 8:08 The final sprint. If I had enough speed to pull this out at the end of a marathon, I could have run the whole thing a bit faster.
So, lessons learned here:
1. Look at the freaking Garmin, stupid! Seriously. There are a couple of points where if I had actually paid attention to the splits I was running, I probably could have salvaged things a bit more, definitely come in under 4:50. What's the point of wearing it if I'm not going to pay attention to the splits?
2. Have a plan. In anticipation of Columbus, Haakan says to me, "You need a plan. It's fine to run/walk, but you need to plan for it." I would rather plan to NOT run/walk, but I clearly need a contingency plan for when I inevitably get tired and need breaks. If I'd been able to run and then walk through the aid stations (which were every mile after the half marathoners split off), I would have cut minutes off my finish time.
3. Tweak the training. I'm thinking more hills, more drinking on the fly, and keeping the Garmin running during bathroom breaks so that I can get a sense of how much time I'm actually losing when I have to stop. I need to check my vanity about the speed of my training runs (which is stupid, since they're not even fast!) and go more for accuracy.
3. Make midcourse corrections. The minor injury to my knee and the time off it required messed me up. In retrospect, it might have been smarter to start with the 4:45 group and try to stick with them. I won't make this mistake again.
1 comment:
Humor me and post your lap times too, since they will be a more accurate measure of your per-mile pace for this race. The Garmin will measure each lap differently, which introduces noise. For my half marathon, my lap times were very consistent -- most around 7:31 (close to my overall pace too). The per-mile pace per lap that my Garmin reports, however, vary a lot more. Always faster than my true pace, but more importantly more noisy -- anything from a few seconds fast to over 10 seconds fast.
For big races where the mile markers are accurate (the Great Race, for example), you really need to look at lap time instead of Garmin pace. Had I not done that at the Great Race two years ago, I would come in over 40 minutes instead of 6 seconds under, since the Garmin told me my pace was faster than it really was.
Post a Comment