I gave myself permission to have a bad day.
Lessons were learned and new mistakes were made.
In the end, I pulled it out but pissed away an even bigger PR (in more ways than one). Here's my race report for Marquette Marathon 2019.
Logistics & Course Info
The trip to Marquette is over 6 hours from Grand Rapids by way of the Mackinac Bridge. No trip up north is complete, however, without a stop at Biere De Mac - where the beer drinking of course began.
Our rental house was less than 10 minutes away from the finish line; after picking up our packets at the small race expo (and perusing the 3-4 vendor booths) we found our way to DIGS for dinner (and beer) before ending up at Blackrocks Brewery for more beer. (These five beers would prove to be a problem later.)
The marathon starts at 7:30am and is point-to-point, from Ishpeming downhill into Marquette for 18 miles, then mostly flat along Lake Superior. There's a serious kick in the pants at mile 22, when you climb the back of Presque Isle … and then a kick in the frontal pants region when you finish uphill on 3rd street for the very last kilometer of the race.
The half-marathon starts at 9:00am, so the shuttles get rolling early. Abbie and Jessica were on not long after they started at 5:30am… I, being me, ended up catching the very last one since I had forgotten things at the house and made a last panicked trip back for it.
Race Within A Race
Because there's a 90-minute headstart for the marathon, this turned in to a race-within-a-race between Dan and I … my personal best marathon was around 2:58:30 so there was certainly a chance that we would be meeting up sometime before the finish. All he had to do was run under 90 minutes and there was a good chance he'd finish first.
Gear & Stuff
I've switched my running shorts to the Brooks Sherpa this past year for racing - they have fairly bounce-free pockets on the sides which can each hold two gels. My hydration belt was in tow, one bottle of water and one bottle of pickle juice. (It's pretty easy to figure out which is which.) Five Hammer Gels and a bag of Salt Stick chews topped off the carb/electrolyte replenishment on-board.
This was my first race in the newest hotness, the Nike Vaporfly Next% - and spoiler alert, this shoe is even more comfortable than the Vaporfly 4% had been. They did not disappoint.
Go Time
To say I had low expectations for this race is an understatement. I had just raced a hard half-marathon (only seconds under my PR) at Millennium Meadows a mere five days beforehand, and I certainly hadn't followed my usual carb-loading routine. I didn't get a lot of sleep and was having a hard time breathing before the race.
But there were some clear advantages that I was not willing to let go to waste: the terrific weather and the downhill course.
This race was my first real shot at a sub-3:00:00 attempt two years previously, and I missed it there by less than 2 seconds per mile. I learned a few things from that experience and planned to run a much smarter race.
The day was perfectly setup for me, with low 30s at the start as well as staying dry and below 50 by race end. Compare that to 2017 which ended with pouring rain and 25+ mph winds blowing the finish line canopies over.
I stuck with a pack of younger runners to start the race, sticking on a 6:50/mi (sub-3) pace as we got going towards the trail. The first several miles are rolling but trend downward - tucking into the pack instead of staying in front of it (like I did in 2017) helped me to keep things under control.
Things got a bit too spicy for my comfort, though, as they started drifting into 6:30s fairly early - I backed off a little bit and they were gone in a flash.
I remembered the long, lonely stretch of downhill trail that comes from mile 12 through 15 - there's only a few cross-roads where you'll see spectators. What I did not remember was that almost 25% of this race is unpaved trail - a surface which is far from the best for maintaining your marathon pace in a pair of Vaporflys!
The other lesson I learned from 2017 was to lean in to the downhill and let loose - running by feel instead of trying to stick to a pace. I'd regretted holding myself back then, and was thrilled to see my heart rate was staying controlled even when speeding it up to 6:20s.
It was while I was descending this trail, all alone for a half-mile in both directions, that I realized my last beer after dinner was at least one too many. I was going to have to pee.
Note I didn't yet come to the conclusion that I was going to have to stop in order to do so. I had options here in Marquette I never had in marathons past: seclusion and a pair of light shorts on instead of compression tights.
Sadly, even with shorts pushed to one side, I discovered that I am not capable of "letting go" while running a 6:25/mi pace.
Mile 15 is where you exit the lonely wooded section of the Iron Ore Heritage Trail and that is where I found my porta-jon. My Garmin tells the tale from that point, as the seconds tick away… from 1:38:13 to 1:39:01 I was not moving. A quick Google search on uroflowmetery tells us that I likely lost 20-25 ounces along with that time.
It was certainly one of a runners' worst-case scenarios: stopping to use the bathroom while running a PR… but if you've never opened two cans of warm beer and poured them down your legs, how do you really know what the best outcome is there?
I shot out of the restroom like a cannon, happy to see that my pace for that mile (despite 50 seconds of standing still) had dropped only to 7:07. I reached mile 18 in exactly 2 hours, 90 seconds better than my previous PR. The hills at the end of the race, however, exacted their toll. I ran a 7:16 mile circling Presque Isle and the trip up past my lactate threshold (175 bpm) made it challenging to pull it back under control. With just 4+ miles ahead, though, I was thrilled to see the time was 2:27:42 on my watch.
I focused my mental energy on maintaining pace to the finish - as often happens at this point in a race, I was beyond started shedding: my hat was tossed to the side at mile 23. My IT band strap I pulled free and ditched at the bottom of the hill near mile 26.
The final challenge is Third Street. By the time you reach the bottom, you still have more than a half-mile to go, up a 100-ft climb. I'd run 26 miles faster than I ever had before, 2:55:19; I wasn't going to quit now. Strava tells me that my sprint to the finish took 4:28, with an average heart rate of 175bpm during that climb.
My final time was 2:58:27, a PR by about 10 seconds over the Carmel Marathon in March. I took 15th overall in the race, and second in my Age Group.
And of course, as I looked around at the finish to seek out the half-marathoners, I realized that I'd won the race-within-a-race, and asked the volunteers to let me award Dan with his finisher medal as he came across.
The usual post-marathon stuff happened - I got cleaned up, collected my strewn-about gear, and spectated Abbie & Jessica's race finish. (Of course, I just made it to their actual crossing the line as they were presenting the Age Group awards as they started climbing Third Street...) Beer was procured and delivered, as always, though as always we narrowly missed several opportunities to catch them.
Post-race recovery at Marquette is some of the best there is - the deepest freshwater lake in North America remains quite cold even at the tail end of summer, and it was a treat to step into those chilly waters following a marathon.
It's a long trip for a short weekend, but the Marquette Marathon has played host to two of my best efforts (despite being overly long and having one of the toughest finish "sprints" there is).
I don't know if the lack of a true "taper" held me back from performing even better (one can assume so?) and of course I know that the 80 ounces or so of beer certainly did. This was going to get worse before it got better unfortunately.
One thing's for sure ... I'd be happy to return to run Marquette anytime!
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