Marathon Recap

Whoa, so I had every intention and doing a follow-up post to my "Mom's and Marathons" post, but with all the fun, busy, lazy summer days we have had, I didn't get to it as soon as I would have liked.  But here we are, so I finished my marathon in record time thanks to my friend Shannon.  It was her first marathon and she did amazing.  She made me work hard and pick up my pace and I'm so thankful for that.  We were able to do all but one of our longs runs together and I really don't know how I did so many of them alone in my previous trainings.  So yea, having a friend to train with should be #1 on your list.  Good luck finding that perfect person that lives close enough that you can run together.

We did the Bear Lake Marathon and it was wonderful!  It is so beautiful up there and we met some neat people during the run.  Our favorite was a guy named Kane.  He ran with us for a good portion of the race and man did time fly when we were with him.  He was so friendly, encouraging and INSPIRING!  He is in the process of running 50 full marathons, in 50 states, in 2012!  The Bear Lake, UT marathon was his 26th race this year.  He ran the marathon on the Idaho side of the lake the day before.  You should check out his website here and he even mentioned running with Shannon and I here.  We were definitely wishing we still had him around for those last 6 miles, but he was long gone by then :)  So now I have another tip that I hope to do better at.  Meet and talk to new people during the race.  It was so interesting to hear his stories and fun that he was so interested in ours.  It made the race go by so much faster and made being part of an event like that even more memorable.  So I'm going to try to break out of my shell more and talk to new people while I'm racing.

This marathon was a lot smaller than the other marathons I've done.  So much so that we took 3rd place in women's and we both won our age divisions!  We finished in 4:05.  That beat my previous record by 15 minutes!  Like I said, that was thanks to Shannon.  I was always just a step or two behind her, but she kept me going.

Another tip I have has to do with the longest training run.  We worked it out so that we ran the first 17 miles of our race to a location where there was a 5K being held.  So we timed it just right so we could jump into the 5K for our last 3 miles.  It definitely helped get us through those last few miles and was so nice to have all the after race snacks and drinks to look forward to.

If you want to keep your running up and not let all your training go to waste, I recommend signing up for another race soon after your marathon.  Even if its a smaller race, it will keep you running.  Its pretty depressing if you quit running cold turkey and lose all that training you have built up.  Trust me I've done it and don't ever want to do it again.  On July 4th I raced in the Neola half marathon and even beat my half marathon PR by 2 minutes, finishing in 1:47.  That was thanks to another friend Staci that let me run by her for almost 2 miles.  I couldn't keep up so had to let her go, but she got me started running like a 7:30 min/mile without even realizing it.  So I thought I had slowed down to my usual 9:20 minute mile, when I was really going somewhere closer to 8:15.

I also recommend running as soon as you feel you are able to after the race.  Definitely listen to your body, but even if you can run a mile or two soon after, that will help loosen up your muscles and get you running again.  I set out to run 3 miles on the treadmill on the Monday after the race and ended up feeling good enough to do 6 miles.  I was almost as proud of that as I was finishing the marathon!

So now what?  Well about a  week and a half after the marathon, while sitting on a 10 hour flight to Eastern Europe (We are in the process of adopting a little girl there) I had the idea to do another marathon in 4 weeks.  Yes, you do crazy things when you spend an entire day traveling.  It did seem a little less crazy after meeting someone who ran 2 marathons in 2 days :)  Thankfully my partner in crime Shannon is almost as crazy and agreed to do it with me.  So a week from Tuesday we are running in the Deseret News 24th of July Marathon.  From what I hear it is a beast.  We will drop 3200 ft in Elevation and climb 1000 ft by the time we are finished.  So to prepare we did and 18.5 mile run down a canyon over here by us.  It was definitely not easy and I'm having a hard time mentally grasping doing another 8 miles of a similar course, but hopefully this training run will help us and then race day excitement will get us through.  It was be neat running through the canyon that my pioneer ancestors came into this valley through in handcarts and wagons 165 years ago.

Well thats about all I have for now.  I need to buckle down and plan my meals for next week, I want to eat really well to help me be as prepared as possible for the marathon.  I also want to show you these cool training schedules on Hal Higdon's site for running back to back marathons.  They helped us put together a training plan for the last few weeks.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!

Taking a pre-race swim.  This was Bryn's first time in the pool and she loved it!

Enjoying our pre-race pizza!

We are the little blue specs up ahead.  It was a beautiful day for the race.

We didn't plan it but we both wore blue shirts to match the scenery

View of the beautiful lake we ran around

Coming in to the finish

I knew good things were in store when I was assigned my favorite number 13!