Flying Pig Marathon Report – brought to you by the letter H

H for:

hills – this is one hilly course…Around the Bay is a cake walk compared to this..

heavy rain and humidity: there were some gaps in the rain but it was the wettest and hottest Pig on record.  Wee!!

heart: the volunteers, spectators, my husband and our support crew have great hearts and I owe them a lot.

healing: I can barely walk stairs and I have blisters upon blisters from the rain.  My pinky toe has no skin left – sexy!

We drove to Cincinnati on Friday in lovely weather –sunny and very warm.  We made it in time to go to the expo and get our race kits.  The expo was pretty good – lots of free samples, nice race t-shirt, a poster and a gym bag.  Pretty sweet.  There are pigs everywhere…

I picked up this awesome shirt that sums up marathon training:

Saturday, it rained…a lot.  One of our group did the 10km so we were out to support her.  For a newbie runner, she did great and didn’t complain about the weather – good lesson for everyone who complains about not wanting to run in ‘bad’ weather.  Post race was a lot resting and obsessively checking the weather reports for race day.  I was pretty certain they would not cancel the race but with the threat of lightning, we weren’t sure.

Sunday dawned to ….more rain, thunder and lightning.  One of the weather forecasters said that marathoners “train in this kind of weather so heavy rain and lightning isn’t an issue.”  Seriously?  You try it buddy.

We all met at the Hyatt to get to the start line together – wearing of course the best in rain gear:

It was humid as well…not something we were used to so we all ended up dumping our ponchos very early in the race and lived with being soaked.

The rain got worse as we headed to the start time…because it was also dark we ended up doing our best to dodge giant puddles which wasn’t always successful so socks and shoes were water logged before the gun went off.  Funny point – just before the race started, a huge thunder clap happened…and the power went out.  What a way to start the race…

The course is tough….I knew this going in.  You know it is tough when the people in my run group tell me it was tough..and some of them have done Boston and are 10+ marathon vets…

 

Overall, the race was really well organized.  The volunteers were amazing, there were a TON of water/gatorade stations and a huge amount of porta potties – Ottawa I am looking at you when I type this.  The people who came out to cheer us on were also amazing – they were just as soaked as us and still yelled their hearts out.  The people in Ontario could take a lesson from them as it means a lot when you are out there as long as some of us are. 

So…how did I do?  Well I am not proud of my time.  It was tough to get a sense of if I was going too fast, knowing if I could hold a pace etc.  I felt great for the first half and then the blisters started.  My body-glided feet/toes did very well in my smart wool socks but there was little I could do.  Around 30km, I stopped and spent about 5 min changing into dry socks and changing band aids.  

This helped a bit but then new ones started.  Around 36km, I stopped again to try to re-band aid and ended up changing back into my smarwools.  By this time, I threw my pace band out the window and just watched any sort of time goal passed by. 

I finished strong in 6:10:  

 

and got this:

Would I do this race again?  If it weren’t so far, maybe but it is tough.  Will I run another marathon?  You bet….Running Hamilton in the Fall with plans to CRUSH this time are in the works.

Thanks for reading and hope you will continue on this journey and not be turned off by my sloooowww time..

Lessons learned will come next.