BMO Vancouver Marathon.... Part 2

I'm writing this a month later...so my memory has faded somewhat....

I guess I never really finished my last post because I was yapping too much about everything BUT the race! So here's Part 2 about the real nuts-and-bolts of what happened that day, again, based on whatever I can remember!

Despite being a rainy day, I managed to make a PR, beating my previous record by over 5 minutes. I had ran with a 2:11:00 pace band, and kept up with it, for the most part. Up until halfway through, I was beating pace by a couple of minutes, but by the time I had reached Prospect Point and that damn hill, all that shaved time crept back up and I was "even" again. I even succumbed to the evils in my head and (gasp!) walked for 30 seconds near the peak of the Point (that lady screaming that we were almost at the top obviously didn't walk that rest of the way to see how inaccurate she was!) But I gained some time on the nice downhill stretch between about 9 and 11 miles, leaving Stanley Park.

Everything on the route was labelled in kms, so I had a pace band in kms splits. I had no idea what I was really running in miles, since I had missed the 5-mile marker and only caught the 10-mile marker. Didn't matter, because by the time I got to the 17-km mark, I was almost ready to pack it in. I don't know how I managed to keep some kind of pace during the last 5 km. All the landmarks I passed made it seem so close to the finish line, yet as I passed ANOTHER familiar landmark, I realized that I was not as close as I thought!

As I approached the Finish, I could finally see the clock, and it was over about a minute and a half slower than what I been going by on my wristwatch. How could that be, I thought. If their km markings were accurate, there's no way my watch is that off! It turns out that in the chaos occurring in my mind at the time, I did not clue in that the clock was showing the Gun Time, and not Chip Time (as in MY Chip Time...how selfish of me!), therefore my clock I was going on was accurate to within a second of my official Chip Time. I can't say, though, that if I knew this at the time, if I would have had the energy to sprint to the Finish like a mad woman to break my goal of 2:11:00. Perhaps me stopping for 30 seconds at the top of the hill back at Prospect Point really did throw off my pace that much to cost me the 14 seconds I needed to make goal. I finished the race in 2:11:14 (former PR was 2:16:27).

But I can't dwell on little things like that, since it's these little things that can wreak havoc to the self-esteem, and I think I still did pretty well, with all the training I had done, to still be able to achieve a PR.

Now, I need another goal to achieve.

I think I'll try running just to run...until my next race, that is!