Downhills and Tailwinds

Today saw the two fastest marathons ever run and four athletes -- including Ryan Hall -- under last year's Boston record. That's why this is not a world-record-certified course: it's downhill, and every so often you get tailwinds from start to finish. Today was such a day.

You'd think with the bigger sail I present I would have gained something from that as well, but I was 8:16 over goal. Pacing went pretty well, until it didn't (about mile 20, where you'd expect things to start hurting).


5368 Huffman, Max 37 M Washington DC USA
5k 10k 15k 20k Half 25k 30k 35k 40k
0:20:37 0:41:26 1:02:36 1:23:57 1:28:32 1:45:05 2:07:36 2:32:19 2:57:10
Finish: Start Offset Pace Proj. Time Offl. Time Overall Gender Division
00:03:12 0:07:11 3:08:15 2616 2407 1616

A few notes:

1. Wellesley College at mile 13 is everything it is cracked up to be. Only being married and a deeply held fear of rejection kept me from taking a 10 minute hiatus and kissing co-eds. Others weren't so inhibited.
2. The crowd support here is unbelievable. From mile 21 on, there is not a foot of road not lined shoulder to shoulder with cheering fans.
3. It was really, really funny watching the police playing whack-a-mole trying to tamp down public urination at the start in Hopkinton. When they chased down one poor schmuck, three others would dive in the bushes behind their backs.
4. One of the few badly thought-through logistical matters was the bussing from Boston Commons to Hopkinton. There were perhaps 10,000 super-saturated marathoners loaded onto busses without restrooms, where we sat for 45 minutes en route to the start. When the bus unloaded, the entire bus ran straight into the woods.
5. You meet some really cool people here. I chatted on the bus with a British expat living in California who finished 8th in the Western States 100 ultramarathon last year. He was fitting this run in between a 50 miler last weekend, and a 50K next, with his ultimate goal the Comrades Ultramarathon.

A couple of updates: The expat was Ian Sharman. He was modest enough not to tell me that he was the guy who went an astounding 12:44 in the flat and fast Rocky Raccoon 100 mile in Texas, this year. That's in the range of a 7:40 pace.

And I forgot to note one index of just how much Boston loves its marathon: the road over which we raced was mostly newly paved, and it was newly striped. The road crews had painted the mile markers in the road, using the road-crew-stencil lettering (none of this race-director-with-a-can-of-spraypaint stuff).