Hello. David here. I am doing this post about the Portland marathon on Oct. 6th. I am late posting, I have been busy with some things. But, here goes.
I ran the Portland marathon on Oct. 6th of this year. So, it was about 3 weeks ago. Running the Marathon in Portland was a great experience. It was a beautiful day, and the route was very scenic, going through a number of beautiful and iconic areas in Portland. I completed the Marathon, so I am very pleased about that. My time was slower than I had anticipated, but I finished the run in 4:16:27., with a 9:47 per mile pace overall.
The course was a little more difficult than I had thought it would be, but a very nice course and certainly challenging at points. Initially my target pace was to run 9:15 per min. I think this was feasible, but I veered from my running plan too much at the beginning. I started out too fast. I know to make sure to slow down at the beginning and watch my pace, and I did force myself to back my pace down some, but I felt real good and let myself cruise along a little faster than I had planned.
Well, to some extent this was a mistake, I think it is good to push oneself, but I think I pushed it a bit much at first. I still had a good run though. My first 5K (3.1 miles), I was running at an 8:55 pace, then my pace at 10K (6.2 miles) was 8:43 min. per mile, so my pace even increased some. At mile 17 I was about a 9:13 pace, but really began to feel some soreness and some less energy about that point, and ultimately slowed my pace considerably during the last 5 miles or so. Had I have not expended extra energy at the beginning and stuck closer to my target pace, I think I would have better maintained a more consistent pace throughout the whole run, and would have finished a little stronger.
But, that’s o.k. I pressed on and still was able to cross that beautiful finish line. I began cramping some at several points in the last 2 miles or so. Several times I had to stop briefly to breath and stretch to loosen those muscles . It helped, but I lost a few minutes with that.
All in all though I am pleased with the results and will examine my performance to see where I could have improved my run, and what I can do differently in the future. Certainly sticking a little closer to my running plan and trusting my training in that a little more is good insight I have gained.
I do wish to run another marathon and hope to improve my time on the next one. Running the Portland marathon was a great experience and another accomplishment with my running that is important to me.
I am in a 5 week post marathon recovery schedule, so I have been running again since the marathon, I took it easy the first week or so, and haven’t run a lot, but I did push out a 20 mile run last week, 3 weeks after the marathon. I am pleased with that, but still want to make sure my body stays healthy and recovers good.
I would like to do another marathon for sure, not sure which one, but plan to run one the beginning of next year sometime, maybe around Spring. I would like to get into some training for longer distance such as preparing for an Ultra-Marathon. These usually start at 50km (approx. 31 miles), but can be distances up to 50 or 100 miles and even more. Now that’s some running. A 50Km would be a nice goal though. So, perhaps I will think more about that.
Well, that’s it for now. Take care.
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