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Buffalo Marathon

May 25, 2014 (Afternoon)

Exercise Type: Run

Weather: warm mostly, pretty nice

Comments:
Woke up at 3am after sleeping on a couch to eat a banana and some toast. Then laid back down before I started getting ready at 4. I ran half a mile on the treadmill to shake out and stretched a tiny bit. Then when we got to the start I ran around a block and stretched out a lot more. There were a ton of people, and I waited in the corale for about 20 minutes kinda scrunched inbetween some people. When we started I was feeling decent and was running with the 3:40 pacers but I felt like I could go faster so I moved ahead after like 3 miles. It was really nice out and there were a ton of people out cheering. The water and gatorade from the aid stations was super helpful and I think the GU helped too, it tastes so much better 10 miles into a race than when you're doing nothing. We ran past bands playing music, tons of people with signs, all sorts of dogs and all sorts of runners. I could see Canada for a small part as we were only about 500 feet away. Running along Lake Erie was pretty cool and the short little windy park after it was kinda nice. Got to run by the Buffalo Sabres arena which was pretty cool. Finally, the half-marathoners finished and the amount of runners near me seemed like it was cut down to a third of what it was before. It was nice to see there weren't as many people running way faster than me as I originally thought. Every once in a while a relay team person would cruise by and make me extremely jealous that they only had to run 6.2. Overall the first half felt pretty good and went by moderately fast. After the half-way point time seemed to slow down though and each mile seemed longer, maybe since there were less people. Either way I feel like I was running better and better as I went up until about mile 19. Around mile 16-17 I actually caught and overtook the 3:30 pacers to my surprise so I was pretty happy. Then at mile 19 though I started to feel really tired and slowed down a bit I think. The 3:30 pacers passed me at about mile 21 and things just went to Hell after that. I felt pretty tight so I started walking at an aid station to get some water and the muscles above my knees got ridiculously tight. It was extremely hard to bend them and run and I went on starting and stopping all the way until the last mile about. Miles 21-24 were extremely terrible though. At some points I was so unbearably tight that I had to stop completely for 20 seconds before I could even jog again. I lost so much time I was afraid the 3:40s would catch me. I think I actually heard them with about a mile left but I sped up for the last mile and powered through the last 800 especially. Because of the awfulness of the end I didn't really get to enjoy much of the scenery in the second half like I did the first, the end was crazy though, there were so many spectators along the fences. I got my medal bestowed upon me by Miss Buffalo and then just got some water and orange slices and just sat down. Every muscle in my lower body was screaming. Overall I'm really happy I did it, and I plan on doing more, hopefully I will have more time to train next time. I came in 244th out of 1268 finishers of the full marathon.