One week after the big event, I am finally able take some time and write about the Marine Corps Marathon. I cannot believe that the day has come and gone. It was like Christmas when I was seven years old, months of anticipation for hours of excitement. After the agony I experienced in the final miles of the California International Marathon last year, I told myself all through training for the Marine Corps Marathon that those last few miles would not be agony this time. Rather, they would be deep pleasure, pure joy, such as you can very rarely achieve in life, the kind of joy that always involves a major milestone and your life’s best friends. And so it was.
Before the race Steve and I decided that we would try to run a 5 hour and 30 minute race. Steve felt that his training indicated he could go that fast, but if we tried to go faster, it might prove regrettable. And I was in complete agreement because I felt like I had spent all that time training and then traveled so far for a run that was fun and filled with camaraderie, not a painful PR. At the start line we found the Cliff Bar 5:30 pacer and made sure we kept her very close for the first five or six miles. With over 30,000 people running, staying close to her was a big deal. She seemed to be going out just a touch faster than 5:30 pace too me, but it wasn’t anything to be concerned about. Plus, I thought she might be factoring in a little time.
At about the six-mile point, I started to realize that I was going to need to hit the bushes, so I told Steve we needed to build a slight lead over the pacer. I thought it would be psychologically easier to have her catch us than to have to catch her. So we put in a little speed, for a little while, and after I hit the bushes we still didn’t see the pace group behind us at all. Around mile 8 or 9, Steve saw them and estimated they were several minutes behind us. We decided to keep that lead as much as we could in order to maintain a potty break factor. At that point, I told Steve we should get it in our heads that if we held the pace group behind us for a long time, they might catch us about mile twenty and then it might be a gut-check to stay with them to the finish.
Along the way, we saw a couple pretty cool looking aircraft fly over us. There was a myriad of helicopters from several different services, but the coolest was a couple of aircraft that had rotating engines, so they could take of vertically and fly horizontally. They were not Harriers. These things were futuristic by the old-Corps standards of Steve and me.
It was the hip thing to do in this race to write something on your shirt. Many women wrote their names on their shirts. Then, when the young Marines saw them coming, they would start cheering for them by name. We saw one gal who had this written on her shirt: “This 26.2 miles is dedicated to every girl who was ever picked last in gym class.” I loved that one. We ran with her for a while and talked. I suggested that she start an athletic clothing line called Last-Girl-Picked. We took a picture with her. I was carrying one of those little grocery store cameras. But I lost the camera somewhere along the way, so the picture is gone. I really wanted to put it on the blog too! Losing the camera was a serious bummer. We had about a dozen pictures on it and we were just getting to the real Washington DC iconic monuments when I reached back to pull it out and found it was gone. Mile 11 to about mile 15 was right where you see the evening news every night with the capitol buildings in the background, pretty awesome to run through.
Around mile 16 we passed a guy who looked like he had gone down hard. Medics were working on him. I looked purposefully too see if they were doing CPR and it did not appear that they were. I commented to Steve that his skin color looked very bad, but since they weren’t doing CPR, it might not be so bad. Later, after the race, we learned that he was transported by life flight helicopter and pronounced dead at the hospital. By the looks of him when we passed by, he was on his way to heaven before he was ever loaded into the life flight helicopter. ABC NEWS STORY
The guy was down right at the beginning of a little section called Haynes Point, a very windy little strip of land that takes you a couple miles along the Potomac River. Many people were crashing hard in this section. People were throwing up on the grass beside the road. We saw an old guy getting his face taped up after apparently tripping and crashing completely on his face. The wind was blowing so hard through this section that I could actually feel the wind blowing through my shoes between my toes. I have never felt that before. The wind may have slowed some people down, but it would have been hard to slow us even more than we had already slowed ourselves!!!!
At about this point, Steve and I each took a power gel with caffeine. I had been fasting from caffeine since about May so it gave me a solid boost. From there to the finish, I don’t think more than five people passed us. We were just moving through the crowd. The actuality of it was that our pace was pretty even throughout the race and those people were all crashing. But it felt great to be the one with the even pace, even it if it was a slow even pace!
It was at this point that I was truly enjoying the aspect of running the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC with my fellow Marine and life long friend, Steve. I was savoring the last few miles… like Christmas when you are seven, and you see that there are only a couple gifts left under the tree…. I wanted each one to last as long as possible.
We passed through mile twenty and still had not been caught by the 5:30 pace group. At mile twenty-five, I heard yelling behind us. When I looked back and saw the 5:30 pace group coming up on us. The mile 26 marker is at the base of the hill that the Iwo Jima Memorial sits on. The finish line is a few vertical feet up that hill at the memorial. We came across it 5 hours 30 minutes and 40 seconds after we crossed the start line.
I will write about the finish and the post race in another article.
Chris
