Marathon

[GreyFox]

Just wondering if anyone else on here ran in the HSBC Calgary Marathon yesterday and how did you do? Even if you ran in the 10k or half marathon did you achieve your goals?

Ran my first marathon yesterday in a time of 4 hours 50 minutes...my goal was just to finish, but around 4 hours would've been nice, but I just had no idea how difficult the last 5k would be.

Post up any experiences from yesterday!

[cornelius85]

I ran it as well. Meant to start a thread yesterday but was dead tired after the race. It was my second race and was looking to be under 4 hrs. Was a little worried before the race as I played in a slowpitch tournament the day before so I was sore, only got 5 hours of sleep, and to top it off I forgot to wear my spandex underwear to prevent chafing. Luckily one of the people from our running group had that body glide stuff and that helped the chafing. I finished in 3:56:43. I passed a lot of people close to the end of the race, but the last 4km specifically the last 2 km was really hard. I had a friend run with me from 33km to the finish line to keep me motivated and that really helped. As long as I was talking to him it kept my mind off of the race. All in all it was a good race, but I am pretty sore today.

[98type_r]

I did my first yesterday as well in 4h 20m. My legs started cramping at about the 25k mark so it was a lot of fun. Had one leg sieze up on me coming down shaganappi hill and I had to stop and stretch it out. I pretty much walked the last 2/3km with as much jogging as I could.

[cornelius85]

I had that cramping as well right around the same point. It happened to me last year and got to the point where my big toe curled up with the contraction and took about 30 seconds to release. I was told it was because I was potassium deficient at that point. I had meant to eat a banana before the race to hopefully prevent it from happening this time, but I was in a rush getting out of the house and forgot it. Luckily I had a friends house at about 27km who set up an aid station for our running group and they had a banana for me there. After that I didn't have any of the cramping. Seemed to work for me.

[GreyFox]

Congrats first of all guys, those are wicked times.

Good old Calgary Transit screwed up and I was almost late for the start. I saw a train FULL of runners just getting off the platform as the gun was going off so that had to have sucked for them.

I ran it with a friend who I had trained with for the past months and we're both at exactly the same pace so we started and finished together which was nice. You're right, it REALLY helps to have somebody there with ya for that last 3k to keep ya going. I would've stopped and walked for sure and same with my friend if we were doing it ourselves. We didn't walk at all the last 7k and passed quite a bit of people because of that. We probably passed a good 20 people in the last kilometer and 4 people within 150 meters of the finish line because they just ran out of gas and/or motivation.