Niagara Falls Marathon 10/25/2009

This was my 6th marathon of the year not counting the 24 hour. Marsha, Charles and I decided to do this after talking the the Niagara rep at the Cleveland Marathon. This was going to be my attempt at a BQ but with the extreme miles I put in in the previous 30 days I had it in my mind that it may be unlikely but I was going and going to give it a shot. We left on Friday morning and were spending the whole weekend there, 3 nights and 4 days. I slept great on Friday night which was good as I never sleep good on the eve of a marathon. Saturday we spent the day with Charles and family and toured the expo. I like going to a marathon a day early but this was 2 days early and I was going crazy having all day Saturday with not much to do but wait for the next day to get there. When we got to Canada we were glad to find out we could text back to the U.S. for free and we did alot of texting. Sunday morning finally arrived, a little earlier than I would have liked though, got up for good about 3 am and headed down to the lobby with the laptop to let Marsha sleep. I went back up about 5 and got Marsha up and we tried to duplicate Columbus morning wearing mostly the same clothes and eating the exact same food for breakfast, a honey wheat oat bagel with peter pan peanut butter and a banana. Around 7 am we met Charles in the lobby and walked down the block to get on bus at 7 am for along trip through customs and to Buffalo where we then went into an art museum for the last hour plus til the start of the marathon. We had been in constant contact with Jeannine and she was going to be texting us during our 26.2 miles and had a message we had to decode after it was over, which was D D A L O G for me and to Marsha, I actually started writing it down til I saw what it said. I was wearing my Muddy Paws shirt on race day and at least 4 people running the marathon also ran this local race, one being the bearded guy Jeannine and I ran into during the Columbus Marathon a week earlier. The race started promptly at 10 am and off we went, said goodbye to Marsha and Charles and I was off, felt pretty good but nearing 7 miles my quads started to get sore and I knew that was gonna be a problem. I did get to see MC n CE right about mile 7 also as we passed on a turn around, I kept my pace hitting the half way point at 1:39:48 but was getting a little more sore all over as time went by, I ran with the couple guys from around here for the first 8 miles then another fella for a long ways parting ways in the last 3 miles. The wind was in our face most of the day which had slowed us all down plenty I would bet but I still would have struggled with or without it. The last 3 miles I was taking 25 second walk breaks at the water stops but was running slower and slower and had some calf cramping wanting to happen, quads wanting to cramp and once even my hamstring stopped me completely for a minute but I kept moving and running real slow til it mostly went away. My slowest mile was 9:38 and my fastest was 7:08 early in the race. The last mile was down hill so when I hit mile 25 I ran almost to the finish line when again the cramps made me walk just before the finish just like in Cleveland. I finished in 3:36:04 just 4 minutes and 16 seconds from my PR but overall was really happy with my time knowing that I was happy just to finish another marathon after all I had done recently. I was the 111 th finisher of 786 runners and Marsha was around 300th. Charles ran into a few problems and was done by mile 20 getting a ride in. Marsha's 4:05 was a 7 minute pr.