San Antonio Rock 'n Roll Marathon

"Running for someone else makes me less willing to give up or give in, more able to withstand the pain and the fatigue knowing that someone else is drawing power from my effort. I look at it as an opportunity to carry a portion of another person's burden, to cover some ground on their behalf, to try to lighten the load by shouldering some of it on our own backs. That's endurance." Kristen Armstrong


As a Team in Training participant, this pretty much sums up why we do what we do. And this year, for this marathon, it meant more than ever. One of our participants' personal honored hero passed away yesterday. This race was very sprecial to our team this year.

Heading into this marathon, I was hoping to set a PR. My record for the marathon distance so far is 4:44. I was hoping to get into the 4:30s somewhere. But when we woke up this morning to temps in the mid 60s and high humidity, I was a little reserved. I don't do well in heat and humidity, but thought I'd give it a go anyway. My plan was to run with one of our coaches and see what we could do. Shorts and a singlet was the outfit.

We figured we would try to maintain around a 10:30 pace, so when we took off and hit 10:13 at mile one we figured we were ok. We did pretty well the first few miles, despite the fact that by mile 2 I was sweating already.

Mile 1: 10:13
Mile 2: 10:22
Mile 3: 10:11
Mile 4: 10:30
Mile 5: got missed and combined with mile 6
Mile 6: 20:55
Mile 7: 10:47
Mile 8: 10:12
Mile 10: 10:25
Mile 11: 10:43
Mile 12: 10:23

At this point my coach's calf muscle was starting to cramp some, so he stopped and stretched a little and we started walking more through the aid stations.

Mile 13: 11:05
Mile 14: 11:24
Mile 15: 10:28
Mile 16: 10:58

At this point coach said he was going to have to walk more and sent me on my way. This was also the point where you head out to a kind of lonely out and back section of the course.

Mile 17: 10:41
Mile 18: 10:51
Mile 19: 11:14
Mile 20: 11:21

The sun started coming out and it started getting really hot.

Mile 21: 12:03
Mile 22: 13:25
Mile 23: 12:37
Mile 24: 13:31
Mile 25: 12:51
Mile 26: 12:39
last .2: 2:27

Garmin Time: 4:53:02. I'll post official time when I see it.

The course wasn't a bad course and was fairly flat. I think if the temps had been 20degrees cooler, I could have gotten my PR today, but it wasn't meant to be. I saw my family several times on the course and saw several TNT alumni as well, which helped. And coming into the finishing chute was nice because some of our team who did the half were done and were along the finish line cheering. My family was also there as well.

After the race, I headed back to the hotel room for a quick shower and then headed home with the two other girls I came with. I've got my lovely hot pink compression socks on and hope that when I wake up in the morning I'll be able to walk fairly well.