Short version: 3:34:05 (third fastest marathon), 6,403/46,795 finishers; 999/16,928 women; 36/1,428 women 50-54. Cannot complain about any of that.
Long version: “coulda, woulda, shoulda…"
I decided to do NYC mostly because some friends were planning to run it, and I had a guaranteed entry so no lottery suspense and no travel package premium. DH (Ed a.k.a. Terrific Whatzit) also wanted to go. I was looking forward to the race but was so ridiculously busy at work that I never did get really excited about it.
We flew to NYC on the Friday morning. It was great to be there with friends and I loved getting out into the city right away, and going to the expo, but I almost fell asleep there while watching the course video! Fortunately I slept well Friday night, and didn’t do too much on Saturday. Although it was fun to get out in the morning to meet up with La, Marg and Marg’s DH to see a friend running the 5 K, after which we walked up to Central Park and checked out the finish line. Always nice to have a sense of where you’re going to end up, and what the last part of the course is like.
Like always, the closer the race got, the more anxious and wound up I got. For NYC, a lot of the anxiety was connected to the start line logistics. Along with three other people in our group, I was scheduled to get the 6:45 a.m. ferry to Staten Island, then take a bus on the other side to the actual start area. We had a plan to meet in the hotel lobby at 6:00 a.m. and take a taxi to the ferry docks, and intellectually I knew that we had enough time, but I was still anxious. Picturing things like the four of us standing forlornly on a street corner as every single taxi passed us by, already filled with runners, causing us to miss our ferry, and not get to the start on time to get into our corrals, etc.
My other big anxiety, as always, was the whole nutrition-digestion thing. After the Midsummer Run porta potty purgatory, I did the Scotiabank marathon in October as a training run that also included a new experiment. At the suggestion of a fellow Maniac, I took an Immodium tablet late afternoon the day before. For nutrition, I relied on water at the aid stations and some GU chomps. The combination worked perfectly –a single GU Chomp at around 10 K, 20 K, 28 K and 35 K, and it was a great run. No energy issues, no GI issues. Okay, strategy for NYC was decided.
Saturday night Ed and I had the usual pre-race veggie sushi dinner (food consumption ending around 6:30 p.m. as usual), I had a good sleep (with an extra hour thanks to the time change), got up at around 4:15, and should have had my usual bagel and peanut butter breakfast (plus a little bit of chocolate for luck). Two problems: I was substituting bread and mixed nuts, since I hadn’t brought any PB from home, and my stomach was in knots and didn’t want any food at all. I did manage to force down the Hallowe’en size Kit Kat and a few nuts, but that was it. Should have brought “my” peanut butter from home, and should have picked up an extra bagel on Saturday.
As it turned out, getting to the start line area went very smoothly, and there was no issue about waiting around and freezing. I was in the Blue corral, along with Ed and some of our group, and another friend travelling separately, and had no trouble finding them. By the time I’d lined up for a bathroom break, it was time to lose the extra layers, put on my race shoes, check my bag, and head for the corral (9:40 start). Somewhere in there I ate about a quarter of a bagel, but couldn’t face/didn’t want more food. Should have eaten the rest anyway, it was at least 1.5 hours before the race start. It was a long wait in the corral – they close about 45 minutes before the race. I should have kept my throwaway fleece instead of leaving it behind with my stuff. Somehow my brain failed to register just how long we would be waiting around… I was wasn’t freezing (short sleeved shirt and arm warmers), but an extra layer would have been nice. But things did get better. My friend and I started talking to a couple of women who turned out to also be from Toronto, and when the corrals were closed and we started to move forward, one of them was about to throw away her fleece. So I got it, and kept it on until about 10 minutes before the actual start. Nice.
Through all the waiting, I was still pretty wound up and nervous. Phantom pains everywhere and huge self-doubt that I was ready to run this any better/faster than Scotiabank’s 3:38. But it all vanished when the starting gun went off and Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was blasting over the loudspeakers. We were at the back of the pack (last corral of the wave), so initially were just standing there, and all of a sudden I just relaxed, started to dance to the music, and when it was time to run my body knew exactly what to do and felt good doing it.
As I’m sure has been reported multiple times, the race starts with its steepest climb, over the Verrazano Narrows bridge. I’m no hill runner, but it really didn’t seem too bad on fresh, reasonably tapered legs! It was incredible to be running with so many people, all of whom seemed to be in such high spirits, the sun was shining, there was at least one helicopter hovering close, etc. Coming off the bridge into Brooklyn and being met with so many people out cheering and a big sign saying something like “Brooklyn loves the NYC marathon” was a tremendous high.
My friend and I had got separated somewhere in the first 5 km. It’s a little paradoxical, but the crowded course was pushing me to a faster pace. I would find myself behind someone, and it was either slow down, or pass, at which point I didn’t want to be “that runner who passes and then slows down”, so I would keep the pace, and then end up behind someone else, lather, rinse, repeat…
In terms of crowds and noise, NYC is unlike any race I’ve done before, including Boston. There were a few stretches of relative quiet, without too many people, but not many. Although at first it was great, there did come a point, I’m not really sure when, that it all started to seem like too much noise. There were virtually no spectators on any of the bridges, and although the sudden quiet (except for the sound of many running feet) was a bit of a shock, it was also quite welcome.
Within a few km I found myself running a sub-3:30 pace, faster than expected. But feeling good for the most part. At the halfway point my time was (per the NYC stats) 1:41:55 and I was starting to worry about holding that pace; it felt too fast. Although I didn’t feel especially tired, I also didn’t feel as though I could have gone faster, and knew that was the signal to dial it back a bit. Which I did, tried to concentrate on just running steady.
The Queensborough Bridge is somewhere around Mile 15 or 16, not too far past the halfway point, and what an ordeal! It’s not a steep climb, but it seems to go on forever, and because you are running on the middle deck, it’s hard to judge how much of the climb remains (or at least I found it hard). I’d try to look ahead, figure out where we would crest the hill, and then would get to that spot and find that we were still going up! So I lost a bit of time there, but then there was a nice downhill to get off the bridge and into Manhattan. Still, I remember that as the absolute hardest hill of the course. Completely underestimated, from the elevation charts, what it would be like. In a sense that’s true of the whole course – overall it was more challenging than I’d expected, although I’d stop short of calling it truly “difficult”.
Anyway, at the 30 km point my total time was 2:26:42, so still on pace for sub-3:30 but not gaining any more of a margin, and I was feeling okay.
It was a warm day, and I was grabbing water at every second or third stop, more frequently as the day went on and the sun got stronger. And, true to plan, I had a GU chomp at 10 K, another one around the half way mark, and another one around 28 K. Somewhere around the 30 K point I tossed the two GU Roctane gels that I had been carrying into an aid station garbage can. That might have been a mistake (shoulda, woulda, coulda…). This was the second race I had dragged them through (Scotiabank being the first), my stomach was turning over at the thought of consuming that warm, sticky stuff, and I didn’t think there was any point in hanging on to them. Until…
…somewhere around 33 km I started to feel like I simply had no energy. It wasn’t that my legs were especially sore, or my cardio was really taxed. It was like someone had just pulled the plug. A little internal voice said, “I’m bonking”, immediately countered by another voice saying, “No you’re not”. But I was. On the last two bridges, neither of which was much of a climb, for the first time I actually walked a little bit outside of the water stations. It was a bit of a gamble – sometimes walking a bit is what you need to get back to running, and sometimes it’s the beginning of the end. But in the stretch up to about 35 km, I realized that my problem was pretty basic – not enough energy in as measured against the energy out. And here’s the real crux of the coulda, woulda, shoulda: shoulda eaten dinner a little later, given the later race start. Shoulda forced down more breakfast. Shoulda consumed more calories along the course. Shoulda kept one of those gels “just in case”. As it was, I immediately ate two of my remaining GU chomps. No GI issues, but my stomach was kind of sour and I was afraid of putting in too much, too fast. Got to the water station around the 35 K point and decided to take a solid walk break and try to regroup – have a big drink of water, blow my nose, take in another GU… Of course, that was where my friends who live in NYC saw me…walking at 35 km…oh well…! They’re runners, they understood when we talked about it later
So, the stretch from 35 to somewhere past 39 km ended up being pretty miserable. Not a death march, per se, but a slow, difficult slog. Again, it wasn’t so much that I was in pain or physically exhausted as it was that I just couldn’t seem to get any energy into my legs. When I first described this, I kept saying that I’d never experienced it before, but later realized that it was pretty much the same as the last 4 km of my first Around the Bay. The race where I consumed nothing but a few sips of water and at 26 km had nothing left.
Another coulda, woulda, shoulda here: was out of GU Chomps and should have had some Gatorade at one of the aid stations to get a quick energy fix. Yes, it’s always been hard on my system but I was having no issues and it was only a few km to the finish line. But it didn’t even cross my mind as a possibility, sad to say. I just kept taking water and trying not to walk (too much). Then finally, somewhere around 39 km, maybe the GU hit my system or maybe I tapped some reserves, but I said to myself “no more walking – even a slow jog is faster than a walk!” and that’s what happened. By then it was too late to get 3:30, or match my 3:31 from Vancouver, but I was going to give it whatever I could and try to finish strong. And did – for the 40 to 42.2 km stretch my pace was a little more than 5:00 min/km, much better than the few km that came before that, and I didn’t walk another step until after the finish line. Almost had a spectacular fall when leaving Columbus Circle to go back into Central Park, and that last 800 yards seemed awfully long, but then it was done.
I won’t dwell on the long walk, or the wait for my bag, or any of that. For a race with 47,000 runners, it was pretty well organized. Best of all, although the four of us hadn’t formally planned to meet up afterwards, we did end up leaving the park as a group and walking back to our hotel. With a stop for beer and nachos along the way – no beer tastes as good as the beer after a long race.
So, thoughts? Well, initially I was a little disappointed, because it would have been very nice to run a 3:30 or at least to match my Vancouver time. But OTOH it was a valuable learning experience with respect to pre-race fuelling, and I will be much more careful before Boston. I was pleased with my ability to identify the problem, take in what I could, and rally for the finish. Coulda, woulda, shoulda managed that last part better, but…run and learn… And although I probably did start too fast, I’m glad it didn’t turn into a burnt out death march on screaming legs.
Thanks for reading
