Bad Race, Good Deed

Right to the point--results of my L.A. Marathon from today:

Bib

FName

LName

City

State

Country

Age

Sex

ChipTime

ClockTime

Overall

SexPl

DivPl

AgeGrade

starttime

pace

split10k

half

split30k

315

Daniel

Fort

West Hollywood

CA

52

M

06:18:30

06:26:15

29

16

9

37.5%

So what happened? Basically, I didn't do enough hill work and it was hotter than usual a couple hours into the race. I was doing pretty good until about mile 10 when I really started slowing down. By the halfway mark it was clear that I was too ambitious with my pace and blew it. At mile 14 I called my wife, Rosie, to tell her I was falling off my pace so I was going to finish later than expected. She then called me at mile 18 to say that Joshua, my nephew, fell down and was having terrible problems--I was just a couple minutes behind him at that point. So instead of trying to salvage what I could (I later found out that I had a chance of placing in my age group) I ended up walking the last several miles with my nephew and encouraging him to finish the race. We crossed the finish line together. Well, I did beat him by one second because he crossed the starting line just ahead of me.

I lost track of some of my split times towards the end, but this is what I could record:

Mile 1 - 12:25          Mile 10 - 13:02          Mile 19 - 15:49
Mile 2 - 12:11          Mile 11 - 14:12          Mile 20 - 17:29
Mile 3 - 11:22          Mile 12 - 14:00          Mile 21 - 16:13
Mile 4 - 11:23          Mile 13 - 13:33          Mile 22 - 16:03
Mile 5 - 11:48          Mile 14 - 14:56          Mile 23 - 16:03
Mile 6 - 11:51          Mile 15 - 15:02          Mile 24 - 16:19
Mile 7 - 12:11          Mile 16 - 14:00          Mile 25 - 20:48
Mile 8 - 12:16          Mile 17 - 14:21          Mile 26 - 17:31
Mile 9 - 13:04          Mile 18 - 15:33

I didn't mark mile 23 so I divided the time between miles 22 and 24. Oh well, nothing to brag about, but I did help my nephew finish, and if it was any consolation, we beat one of my co-workers who was running in the marathon.

When I checked the finish times for the racewalkers I was surprised at how slow this race was for the walkers. More on this in another post. Right now I'm going to wash up and decide when I'll be ready to race again or if I'm washed up--terrible pun, sorry about that.