I did it! After months of training, injuries and countless toe surgeries I finished my first marathon. When I was training my goal was to go sub 4 hours. I finished in 4:24:07 and gave it everything I had. I ran a 2:09 for the first half and it just went down hill from there. I stopped noticing the pain in my tailbone around the 20 mile mark because my legs felt so tired.
I’m SO happy to have finished but at the same time disappointed I fell far short of my goal. I think there were a lot of reasons I did not meet my goal time. Lots of small/bad timing things but there were also three fundamental problems that I need to correct.
- Doubt. I went the entire race thinking I was going to blow out my back on my next step. This really hurt my mentally. I need to train smarter so I’m not going into the race nursing an injury.
- Bigger Shoes. My feet are wrecked. I have two toenails that are definitely going to fall off and a third that is questionable. Blisters are going to happen but I need to take steps to minimize my black toe as much as possible. My first black toes came from size 10.5 shoes, I did this marathon in size 11 shoes and I already have size 11.5 shoes that I’m going to start wearing this week (once I’m ready to run again).
- I want to add swimming into my routine so I can get a 5th exercise day back in my schedule. Starting around the first week of March I cut out my cross-train day (biking) because it was causing discomfort in my knees This left me with four days of running and three days of rest. This was too much rest. I’m a natural in the water so working this back into my training schedule will increase my endurance and confidence.