During the short training period I had for the Hamilton Marathon I continually heard the same thing "a marathon, that's like a sprint for you right".This or "that will be a walk in the park for you",it would be nice if this was anywhere near the truth.The truth is the marathon hurts,every time,no matter what you've run before. Ultras are a long drawn out period of pain,the mind adjusts and sometimes even forgets the pain but in a marathon you jam all that pain into a full speed assault on a 42km run and just hope you hold it together until the finish. There was definitely some advantage in the fact that mentally the distance was not nearly as intimidating as it had once been.
Training for this event was largely based on shorter tempo runs, my friend Henry once told me you can't run a three hour marathon without running a forty minute 10k first and I used that theory as the building block in my training.The sudden switch to pavement after a whole year of trail running played havoc on my Achilles and feet,while it was a lot of fun to hammer out some shorter runs I'm looking forward to the return to soft muddy trails.
Race day temps were perfect and I had a sub three hour goal in mind. Gord from Hamilton Runners Den had recommended holding pace and letting the downhill in the second half help me run a negative split in the second half unfortunately the wind had other ideas. The turn onto the downhill section brought little to no advantage this year,the wind was pushing hard into my face all the way down leaving me feeling like there was very little left in the tank when we got back into a more sheltered section. Looking back at my Garmin I actually accelerated after the downhill. The end result,3:00:41 a personal best in the marathon by 15:19 . I definitely have no regrets,every race is a stepping stone and I really think the sub 3 is coming yet.
Road 2 Hope Marathon is a great event,it's well organized and the course is definitely fast and interesting,if your looking for that Boston Qualifier this is the race to do it in!
Now back to some mud!
