Yesterday, I ran 3 miles at an 8:58/mile average, and then I met Clark at the gym for a strength training class.
I brought our ketchup and mustard costumes. Don’t ask me how these made the cut to bring across the country with us when we moved, but I was glad we’d held onto them when we needed a last-minute Halloween costume.
We tried doing the workout in them but we both took them off less than two minutes in haha.
It was much harder doing a workout like that in them than it had been to run a 5K back in 2017:
I just wanted to post another picture of Pepper!
Anyway, I’m going to do another short run here in a minute, and then this afternoon I’m going with Clark to Oceanside so he can get himself and his bike checked in for his half Ironman tomorrow morning.
I signed up to volunteer at one of the aid stations on the run course from 8 a.m. to noon. The aid station captain emailed us last week asking us to all dress up like “tacky tourists,” since it’s the day before Halloween, so I got an obnoxious Hawaiian shirt, a pair of crew socks with a beach print and some cheap Birkenstock dupes off Amazon. I also ordered a fanny pack but the delivery got pushed back to Monday, so I canceled it. Hopefully I can find one in one of the souvenir shops in Oceanside this afternoon.
So I won’t run tomorrow, but I do plan on a long run Sunday, 10-12 miles, depending on how I’m feeling.
Tuesday, Clark and I went to a strength training class at the gym, followed immediately by the track night workout. Two weeks in a row for me!
We did eight 400-meter repeats.
There were only five of us who did the workout. One guy was way faster, but the rest of us were pretty evenly matched and ran them all in a little pack. As a result, they got progressively faster — one of the reasons it can be beneficial to do these with other runners instead of on your own.
Our eight splits were 1:46, 1:45, 1:42, 1:41, 1:40, 1:41 (OK that one went in the wrong direction), 1:39 and 1:35, with a minute of rest after each.
With the brief warmup and cool down, we did a total of about three miles.
Normally I like to take at least a day in between these strength training classes, but yesterday was the initial fit test, so Clark and I went to the after-work class again to do that.
It was a typical cutdown workout — starting with 100 reps of one exercise, followed by 90 of another, 80 of another, etc., until you got down to 10 burpees. We also had to run a big lap of the entire shopping center before starting the reps and then after completing the 60-rep exercise, and finally, after recording our time, we could hold a plank for as long as possible and subtract the number of whole minutes from our fit test time.
It took me 19 minutes even to finish the workout and then I held a plank for two, for a final score of 17 minutes.
The Wednesday night run club conveniently met at Grand Slam, the pizza place right next to the gym.
Clark and I ran-walked a hilly 3-mile loop at an 11-something pace.
Today, we are again hitting the gym, because we’re all supposed to do a workout in a Halloween costume, so we’re breaking out the ketchup and mustard costumes from a few years ago. I wish we still had Pepper with us to be our hot dog!
I think I’ll go out now and run a few miles before the workout.
Sunday’s run at the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Half Marathon was pretty tough. I don’t know if I just wasn’t as recovered from the marathon three weeks ago as I thought or what, but I never felt comfortable and it was a struggle the whole way. I also had to make two port-o-potty stops, but what else is new.
Clark got home very late Friday night from his work trip to Toronto. His new running shoes had arrived in the mail that day, so Saturday morning, he went with me to run a few miles in them.
We ran 4 miles along the coast. Apparently his new shoes felt pretty good, because he was rolling along at an 8:30/mile pace or faster most of the way. I didn’t quite try to keep up with him, because I had 13.1 to run the next morning, but I still ran faster than I would have on my own.
Later that morning, we went to pick up a triathlon bike for my brother. He wants to do the Oceanside 70.3 here sometime, possibly next April, and instead of shipping his bike out here, he wanted to get a “west coast” bike he could just keep at our house. So he found a used Cannondale for less than $1,000 on Craigslist.
We met the seller in La Jolla — which, as he’d texted my brother, is one of the nicer parts of San Diego. That’s true, but it seemed like a weird thing to bother texting someone who was just interested in buying an old tri bike.
Well then Clark met the guy (I’d gone off in search of coffee while we were waiting for him in a CVS parking lot) and it made sense. He was, as Clark put it, very fond of himself. Just in this bike exchange, he found a way to tell Clark how he’s into body building now and not many 50-year-olds have a body like his so he competes with younger guys who aren’t as saggy but are all on steroids, and also he’s downsizing his bike collection because it doesn’t all fit in his current estate like it did in the last five estates he owned.
Also he sounded like Mike Tyson haha.
And yes, we now refer to our house as an estate.
We laughed about that guy the rest of the way to San Diego, where I had to pick up my race stuff at the expo in the convention center. That was pretty quick and then we walked down to the harbor and had lunch at Ketch Brewing. Since we were so close to Little Italy, we went there next to hit Ballast Point, and there was a new Mikkeller tasting room just down the street, so we stopped in there too.
We went back to our estate and watched the Dodgers lose the game and therefore the series to the Braves. Boo! No World Series title this year.
Dave’s west coast bike in our garage.
Sunday morning, my alarm went off at 4:15 and we were out the door before 5.
Two reasons we left so early: I thought there’d be traffic, and the race started at 6:15.
Much to my surprise, when we got there around 5:30, there was zero traffic. Clark was able to pull up right next to the race start line, the next street over, and when I walked over, there were only a handful of people milling about. Weird.
I grabbed a bottle of water and wandered around a bit. These Rock ‘n’ Roll races are usually huge — where is everyone? I had my pick of the port-o-potties with no wait every time I had to pee, and there was no line to drop off my bag at gear check at 6.
At 6:11 or so, I went to get in my corral, and they weren’t letting any runners in yet. That was when I finally realized I was probably off so I checked the website.
Yep, the start time was 6:45. I’d gotten there an hour and 15 minutes before the start, which explained a lot.
Clark had also thought it was weird when there was still plenty of parking available near the finish area. He did get this sweet picture of my car with the sunrise out of it though.
The only explanation I can think of is that this race is usually the first weekend in June — it got pushed back this year because of the pandemic — and they’d still had the 6:15 a.m. start time on the site when I signed up for it months ago. Then they made it later because it’s late October and the sun doesn’t come up until almost 7, but I missed that.
Anyway, they finally let us all in the corrals, and then we started making our way to the front. They were trying to spread out the start even more than usual, so they had a series of gates at the front that we had to line up in, and then some lights on the starting line arch would turn from red to green, and the first couple runners in each line would take off.
Just to be clear — we were all packed into the corrals as tightly as we ever were before COVID, so if the drawn-out starting line thing had anything to do with COVID, I don’t think it worked ha.
But I will say, the first mile was a LOT more pleasant than it usually is. Other than the typical walkers who start near the front for no apparent reason, there wasn’t all the crowding and darting around people you usually see in a big race like this one.
It probably took forever to get everyone going though. I was in the fifth corral of 33 and it took me almost 15 minutes to cross the start line.
Finally, on to the race itself.
The weather was nice. I was comfortable in shorts and a tank top and never felt too hot, even when the sun came up.
The course was cool. Both the half and the full went through the North Park and Normal Heights neighborhoods, residential and commercial areas. There were a lot of loud spectators everywhere.
I’m not sure we were ever on flat ground. It wasn’t always a severe up or down (though we hit several of both) but it seemed like there was always a low-grade incline or decline.
After the half and full split, the half went down around Balboa Park, crossed under the 5 and went downtown toward the finish blocks from the harbor.
The first five miles, I ran between 8:34 and 8:56. I had to stop to use a port-o-potty right before the sixth mile marker so when I finally passed it, that split was 10:01.
Miles 7-12 were back in the 8:36-9:04 range, depending on the amount of up/down (there was a gnarly uphill right after the 10th mile marker) and then I had to stop at the second port-o-potty right after the mile 12 marker.
With the second stop, the 13th mile split was 9:53, and then I finished 13.1 miles officially (13.3 by my watch with all the port-o-potty stops) in 1:58:46.
I got my medal and a ton of food in the finisher’s chute, though I wasn’t hungry yet, and continued down Ash Street to the finish line festival near the City Hall building by the harbor.
I used to complain about the watery Michelob Ultra we always got after the Rock ‘n’ Roll half in Virginia Beach. Well now we don’t get any alcohol at all after all that running haha:
You still had to show ID to get it, and they still had six security guards at the entrance and exit to the beer pen.
Clark met me there and got a picture of me by the harbor in our running club’s new singlet, since this was its race debut. I had to take off my bib because it was so huge it covered half the print.
Several local businesses were offering discounts to runners with our race bibs, so Clark and I went back to North Park and took advantage of a couple of those, before heading back to our estate. (I am still laughing about that ha!)
We did go to the village for dinner but we were back home and both asleep by 8:30, and I slept like a rock last night. Getting up at 4:15 for no good reason will take it out of you.
Race shirt, bib and medal.
Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Half Marathon:
1:58:46
118th/803 F 35-39
419th/4,821 women
1,247th/8,577 overall
The race date next year is back to June 5, and there’s early bird registration prices ($65 for the half) available on the website through Oct. 31. I might sign up. A $65 half is hard to come by.
Next up on my racing calendar is the Rehoboth Half Marathon on Dec. 4. I would like to run it faster than this one, so I’m going to try to stick to the running club’s track workouts on Tuesday nights and long runs on the weekends.
The first week of the challenge at our gym is going well.
Tuesday, after work, I went to the gym and did in-person the strength training class I’ve been doing mostly in my living room since the pandemic hit last March. It was kind of weird — felt like I’d somehow stepped through my laptop screen into the gym haha — but it was fun.
The gym is right down the street from the high school where the running group does its Tuesday night track workouts, so I headed there next. It has been even longer since I showed up for one of these — or tried to do a speed workout on my own — and I was a little anxious.
Our coach, Jim, had us do two laps super easy to warm up, then three 400-meter intervals, then a mile, and then three more 400s, with a minute of rest between each.
It went surprisingly well. I screwed up hitting the lap button on my Garmin to accurately record my interval paces myself, but Jim was calling out our times for each interval and I mostly remember them. The first set of 400s were all between 1:43 and 1:48, my mile was 7:28 and the last set of 400s were about the same as the first until the last one — I pulled off a 1:37, which is 6:29/mile pace.
I definitely want to get back to the days when all my 400s were as fast as that last one and my mile time was under 7:00. But it was a great start and I intend to make track night a regular thing.
Oh, fun fact — the high school where we do the workouts, Rancho Buena Vista, is the one Dave Roberts graduated from. He’s the manager of the Dodgers. They pulled off a win over the Braves that night, but unfortunately the rest of the series so far has been all Atlanta, and the Dodgers are down 3-1. They play again in a couple hours. Fingers crossed the Dodgers can pull off a win and stay alive.
Anyway, Wednesday, I met the running group in the evening and did the neighborhood run. I ran with Shawn again and we did 3.7 hilly miles in Vista at an 8:33/mile average.
And today, I made it to the 6 a.m. strength training class at the gym. I’m about to go out and run a few miles on my own here shortly.
Also this week, we got our bib number assignments for the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Half Marathon this Sunday. I’m 2785.
Saturday morning, Clark and I went for a run together first thing in the morning.
Our gym’s running group meets at 6 a.m. in a park about a mile and a half from our house. We tried to get there when they met, but we left our house a little too late. Milad took a picture of us anyway when we ran into the group after they’d started their run.
Fashionably late haha.
They all were heading south towards Encinitas, but we went north toward Oceanside.
We got to the pier in time to see the sunrise. It was a really pretty morning.
There was also some kind of surf competition clinic happening on the other side of the pier.
I saw one seagull and about 3,000 pigeons.
At that point we were about 5.5 miles into what we wanted to be a 10-mile run. We turned around and headed back home, taking a shortcut through the village.
Clark’s shoes are pretty worn out (he wore them in the LA Marathon in March 2020) and he got some calf cramps that slowed him to a walk for a bit of the way back. We finished 10.2 miles total at an 11:03/mile average.
We did some yard work when we got back, then took a truckload of green waste to the local transfer station. It’s nice to know that option is there — it would’ve taken months to get rid of all that in the once-weekly trash pickup — but it was way more expensive than our local landfill had been back in Delaware.
We watched the first game of the Dodgers-Braves series that evening, which did not go the way we wanted it to.
Sunday morning, I ran an easy 5-miler on my own along the coast at an 8:59/mile average.
We did a little more yard work and some laundry, and stopped by Road Runner Sports so Clark could order a new pair of running shoes for his half Ironman on Oct. 30, but other than that we just watched football, NASCAR and the second Dodgers game, which did not go our way again.
Clark left very early this morning for a weeklong work trip to Toronto. Today is also the first day of the seven-week challenge we signed up for at the gym.
I think I’m going to try going to a strength training class in person tomorrow evening, followed by the weekly track workout at a high school near the gym, and then another strength training class Thursday morning. I’ll see how that schedule works out for me.
As far as today goes, I’m just going to do a short easy run.
I’ve been slacking on this blog this week, but that’s partly because I’ve been slacking on running too.
I ran Monday evening, 3 miles at an easy pace I don’t remember now.
The beach in Carlsbad.
But I haven’t run since! I’m thinking about doing a few miles here in a little bit. Maybe.
I have been doing some strength training though. I did one of the virtual classes here at home Tuesday evening. Then, Wednesday afternoon, Clark’s coworker talked us into coming to the gym at 5 a.m. the next day for an hour-long “Grand Hustle” workout — one of our teammates, from the one challenge we did at the gym early last year before COVID shut everything down, was hitting her 1,000th workout milestone, and they always welcome that member to the Grand Hustle club by making everyone do a brutal 1,000-rep workout.
So my alarm went off just after 4 a.m. Thursday, and Clark and I went to the gym. He’s done a couple of the Saturday morning workouts there this year, but this was my first time physically inside that gym since last July.
The workout was pretty tough. I’m not sure anyone actually completed all 1,000 reps before the class ended, even when the coach replaced some of the 20-burpee sets with something easier like body weight squats. I think I got in about 880 reps total, plus the laps we had to run around the parking lot between sets.
Then, later that same afternoon, the same coworker talked Clark into talking me into joining the next seven-week challenge at the gym, which starts Monday. So, after having not been in that gym for 15 months, I was in it twice yesterday, because Clark and I went in the evening for initial weigh-in/orientation.
I’m not sure what my schedule will look like going forward, beginning next week, but I’d like to make it to the gym for a strength training class at least twice, maybe three times a week, and finally start going to the track workouts at a local high school on Tuesday nights again.
Also this week we watched a lot of sports — the Ravens pulled off a pretty awesome come-from-way-behind win Monday night and the Dodgers won the last two games of their series against the Giants to advance to the NLCS against the Braves.
Anyway, I do have a half marathon to run next Sunday in San Diego, so I think it’s time to consider myself recovered from the marathon two weeks ago and start getting in some more miles. I plan on a shorter run tomorrow and a longer one Sunday, maybe 10 miles.
Other than that, we don’t have any big plans for the weekend.
Friday afternoon, I went out and ran 3 easy miles at a 9:26/mile average.
Saturday morning, we went to Oceanside to try High/Low, a new restaurant in one of the big hotels they were building between our old apartment building and the ocean the whole time we were living there. It was pretty good.
We also stopped at Parlor Doughnuts in the apartment building right next to ours, which wasn’t quite open yet when we moved. I’m glad it wasn’t, because I’m pretty sure I’d have had doughnuts for breakfast every day. They were layered and flaky and the pumpkin chai latte flavor I tried was SO good!
And we checked out the Top Gun house, which you can now walk up to on the porch. The interior is still far from ready for whatever they’re going to do with it, but I just think it’s so cool they are restoring one of the last remaining original 1880s beach cottages in Oceanside. Plus, Tom Cruise was there!
Looking out at the pier from the side of the house.
We spent most of the rest of the afternoon in Oceanside and then came home to watch the Dodgers tie up their series with the Giants.
Sunday, Clark left early to meet the group from the gym for a bike ride. I got up and went out for a run while he was gone.
It was a really nice morning for a run but I just wasn’t feeling it and walked whenever I felt like it. I covered 8.2 miles at a 9:50/mile average.
We spent the rest of the day watching football and NASCAR. Clark finally got everything lined up for a work trip to Canada this week, only to find out at like 9 p.m. his second flight today had already been canceled for “bad weather.” There were no more connecting flights to where he was headed within the acceptable time frame of his recent negative COVID test, so he wound up having to push off the whole thing another week.
Today, I woke up to a ton of notifications from the Boston Marathon tracking app about everyone I knew and how their races were going, so I followed them all morning while I worked from my couch. Looked like a good day to run a marathon there, so congrats to everyone!
Anyway, I think I’ll go out and do another short easy run before the Ravens and Dodgers games later.
I’ve had a nice time recovering from the St. George Marathon.
Monday morning, I donated blood, which just made it that much easier to not be tempted to try to run for a couple more days.
That night, we had a thunderstorm here so unusually powerful, someone (who must’ve grown up here) posted on NextDoor asking what all the rumbling was, because it was too late for the Marines on Camp Pendleton to be blowing things up, which is what that sound normally is around here. Her guess was gunshots haha. I’ve only heard thunder a handful of times since we moved here but that storm was strong even by East Coast standards.
Tuesday was another rest day. After I left my office, Clark and I met at a bar and watched the Red Sox eliminate the Yankees from the playoffs. That was fun.
Yesterday after work, we met our run club at Grand Slam, a pizza place next to the gym. The main objective was to pick up the club gear we’d all ordered from Wattie Ink a few months ago. Clark got a tri suit, and one for my brother, while I just got a running tank top.
I’m glad it arrived in time for my next race, the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Half Marathon on Oct. 24.
Since I was there, I did the short neighborhood run with the club. It was just a few other runners who showed up last night and I wound up running a 3-mile out-and-back with Shawn, a sub-1:30 half marathoner and the fastest runner in our group. I was huffing and puffing trying to keep up with him on the hills in Vista while he didn’t seem to be trying at all haha. I mean, it was my first run back since a marathon four days earlier, but anyway.
Clark had skipped the run to watch the beginning of the Dodgers-Cardinals playoff game. Turns out the owner of Grand Slam is a Dodgers fan, and so was pretty much everyone else in there to watch the game, so that worked out.
We stayed until the end when Chris Taylor hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the game and send the Dodgers on to the division series. That was even more fun than the game the night before!
Today, I don’t know what the plan is. I might go for another short run later.
The short story: Downhills can hurt just as bad as uphills, just in different ways! The St. George Marathon course was gorgeous but painful ha. I couldn’t quite keep it under four hours there at the end and finished in 4:03:54. But it was great to get back into real races again!
The much longer story:
Thursday afternoon, Clark and I took off for Las Vegas, the first leg of our drive to St. George. Traffic in the Riverside area held us up and added about an hour to the drive. We got to our hotel, The Palazzo, around 9 p.m.
After checking in, we had a late dinner at Yardbird, where we split a whole fried chicken with waffles and watermelon:
Then we went out on the Strip. We made it to the Bellagio in time to see the last fountain show of the night, set to Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas.”
We went in the Bellagio and had a drink. I really liked this huge glass bouquet hanging from the ceiling in the lobby:
And then we made our way back to our hotel.
The Strip across from the Bellagio.
Gondola rides near the Venetian.
I had not taken off any time from work for this trip so I got up early Friday morning and got as much done as possible before we checked out of the hotel and drove to St. George.
We stopped by the expo first, where I picked up my race bib and shirt, and got assigned to a start-line bus departure time for the next morning. They started as early as 3:30 a.m. but I was able to snag one for the latest time, 5:15.
We checked into the hotel next and I finished up a little more work. Clark was taking a nap so I went for a walk to check out the bus pick-up/finish line area.
I would see this again soon!
I like running new races for the change in scenery, but I hate not knowing every little detail about the logistics like I do for races I’ve done a million times. I felt a lot better once I knew exactly how long a walk it was from our hotel to the bus pickup area and where everything was.
Then I walked around downtown St. George a bit. They’d recently hosted the Ironman 70.3 World Championship. My brother actually qualified for a spot in that race based on his Eagleman age group placing back in June, but he had to turn it down this year because the training would’ve landed during an extremely busy time on the farm and it’s a surprise huge expense, between travel and just registering for the race.
Ironman 70.3 statue in the middle of a traffic circle in downtown St. George.
I found a nice little Italian restaurant, Chef Alfredo’s, that was kind enough to squeeze me in amongst all its reservations. I had tortellini with chicken. The waitress was very curious why the restaurant was so busy at 4:30 in the afternoon with people shoveling as much pasta as possible down their gullets haha. She correctly guessed we were all carb-loading. She also left me an entire carafe of ice water so I could just keep refilling my glass myself.
By that time, Clark had woken up from his nap and found the one brewery in St. George, Zion Brewery Station II, so I met him there.
Utah is not big on beer, which is not surprising since the state has a huge Mormon presence and they don’t drink alcohol. But they recently raised the ABV limit on draft beers from 3.2% to 5% (they can also serve any ABV in bottles or cans) so all of the beers at this brewery were around 5%.
We stopped by Hive 435 Taphouse, which had a ton of draft beers on tap. Again, nothing on draft was over 5%, and we saw some on the list that are definitely heavier if you buy them anywhere else, so I guess they brew a special version just for Utah.
We went back to the hotel. I got all my race stuff in order and set the alarm for 4 a.m.
I woke up long before my alarm went off and just could not get back to sleep. When it finally went off, I got dressed, ate a plain bagel and started working on a big bottle of Gatorade, and left the hotel around 4:45.
I didn’t have to wait long in line to get on a bus to the start. I sat with another woman, from Idaho, who was there to run her first marathon ever, after having done several half marathons. She said she works in cardiology and sees all the time what happens to people who live very sedentary lives so she likes doing “little things” to keep her heart healthy… like running marathons haha.
Bus rides to point-to-point course start lines always feel so long and this one was no exception!
But then we were THERE. The only way to get back was to run!
The start area here was pretty cool. They had a ton of bonfires — at least 15, I’d say — for people to gather around since it was kinda cold out and people had started arriving by bus three hours before 7 a.m. start time. They also had all kinds of food, water, Gatorade, coffee, hot chocolate and tea.
I got some coffee and ate the stroopwafel we’d gotten in our race bags. Then I finished off my bottle of Gatorade and got in line for a port-o-potty, which didn’t take long because there were so many port-o-potties.
It was about time to get in the corral by then, so I pulled off my sweatpants and turned in my gear check bag. I kept on my old bathrobe until I got in the corral, and then draped it over the side once we were on our way to cross the line. Those things are such great throwaway clothing and I need to get another one from a thrift shop for the next race.
And then it was go time!
Not far past the start line, I heard a woman ask a group of boys running the race how old they were. One said he was 8, and the woman blurted out “HOLY SHIT!” then immediately apologized for swearing at an 8-year-old haha. But seriously, holy shit! The other two were 10 and 11. They said they’d all run 20 miles in training. That is amazing!
Anyway, I knew the first seven miles were going to be nice and easy — more downhill than up — so I tried to bank a little time there. My splits were all between 8:32 and 9:00.
It was still dark when we started but the sun was starting to rise as we ran. We were on the only road through the area, which was otherwise just wide open land and mountains in the distance. It was so pretty! I wanted to take a picture but I was still feeling good enough to not want to stop haha.
Around mile 7.5, we got to the bottom of a sweet downhill, and then there it was: Veyo.
Veyo is an ancient volcano and the road here suddenly goes very steeply uphill, our first real uphill of the day and definitely the most severe one on the course. I managed to run most of it but I did take a couple walk breaks.
Mile 8 chimed in at 9:57 and we were still climbing. It finally leveled out and I heard a guy near me say, “That was the steep one, now here comes the long one!” Great!
It wasn’t long before we started climbing again, but like that guy said, this one wasn’t nearly as steep, it just went on forever. I just tried to keep an even effort. Miles 9, 10 and 11 were 9:21, 9:14 and 9:36.
At mile 11, I had to stop to pee. I’d had to go since the start and hoped it would just go away, but after 11 miles I had to admit it was not, in fact, going away. I felt so much better after I’d emptied my bladder, but the stop and then the rest of the climb in the 12th mile slowed that split to 10:07.
We FINALLY started heading downhill again, and I got mile 13 back down to 9:00. I crossed the halfway timing mat just under two hours. I knew the second half was way more downhill, and we’d gotten most of the ups out of the way in the first half, so I genuinely believed I was going to negative-split a marathon for the first time and run under 4 hours.
Mile 14 was 9:13, but then in the 15th mile, another runner caught up with me and asked how I was feeling. For whatever reason, I was really in the mood to chat, so I latched onto her and we had a full-on conversation as we barreled down some pretty good downhills. Miles 15 and 16 were 8:48 and 8:44, the last sub-9s I would see.
This was also the part of the course we ran past Snow Canyon. There was a point where we went around a bend in the road and then were running toward these huge mountains (well, they looked like mountains to me anyway haha.) I don’t think I can overstate how freaking gorgeous this whole course was!
As we came up on the mile 16 port-o-potties (they had port-o-potties at every single mile marker whether there was an aid station there or not) I had to say goodbye to my new best friend and use one. It just wouldn’t be a marathon for me if I didn’t have to poop at least once.
Back on the road, I realized I “only” had 10 more miles to run. The bathroom break slowed my mile 17 split to 10:01 but I got 18 back to 9:04.
Then we hit a couple small uphills in miles 19 and 20 and I had to take a couple more short walk breaks. Those splits were 9:59 and 10:01.
Since I was walking anyway, I finally took out my phone and took some pictures of the course:
I think it was somewhere in here I also got an aid station volunteer to slather Icy Hot all over my calf muscles. I guess it’s because I’m more of a forefoot striker, but my calves are always the first thing to hurt after running downhill instead of my quads. Also, my feet were starting to really hurt from smashing against the front of the toe box with every step downhill.
I think the Icy Hot really helped because soon I wasn’t noticing my calves at all. But my feet were killing me, and so was every ab muscle around my torso — back and obliques too — I guess from bracing myself on the downhills.
We’d get a flat part and my torso wouldn’t feel so bad, but then we’d hit another downhill and suddenly it’d start feeling like one big cramp again.
Miles 21-23 were still mostly downhill heading back toward town. Those splits were 9:18, 9:44 and 9:49. I was walking through every single aid station, which got really frequent in the final 10K.
At mile 24, we finally turned into town and things flattened out. That split was 9:06.
I think it was the mile 25 aid station, I stopped to let some kids dump cups of water on me. What a fun volunteer assignment haha. Definitely better than wearing rubber gloves and smearing handfuls of Icy Hot onto strangers’ legs (though I appreciated those volunteers so much!)
That next-to-last split was 9:41 but I got mile 26 to 9:09 and then the last 0.2 to 8:45 pace. Clark yelled my name and I waved at him as I made my way to the finish line in 4:03:54.
I got a really pretty finisher’s medal, walked slowly through a misting tent and then wandered into the runner recovery area. I really wasn’t hungry but I got a Creamies popsicle and a big slab of Great Harvest bread slathered in butter.
I also got a cup of cold Barq’s root beer, and then sat on the grass for a minute. Just as I was about to try to push myself back up to my feet, a runner came over with his hand outstretched. I grabbed it, thinking he was trying to help me up — but he was just trying to point at the root beer to ask where I got it haha! I don’t know about you, but I really missed awkward moments with random strangers when everything was getting canceled. That’s one that’ll pop into my head at 3 a.m. and keep me up for a while haha.
Finally I hobbled over to gear check and got my bag, which I’d been smart enough to put flip flops in. Surprisingly, my toes were intact when I took off my shoes. They really felt like they’d been beat to a bloody pulp!
Then I found Clark sitting at a picnic table and just sat there with him for a bit, enjoying not having to run anymore.
Eventually we made our way back to the hotel where I showered off all the Icy Hot and crusted-on sweat everywhere. I felt pretty good after that!
We stayed in St. George that night too, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening walking to different restaurants, eating and drinking.
Sunday morning, we slept in, checked out of the hotel and had breakfast at a nice little restaurant, Wood Ash Rye.
I was kinda sore but I really wanted to do some kind of short hike before we left, so we drove up to Snow Canyon State Park.
The shortest hike that had a scenic overlook was the Lava Flow Trail, so that’s where we went.
View from the top.
There were so many more miles of trails there that all looked enticing but that was enough for me the day after a marathon.
Then we left St. George to head back to Carlsbad. The drive home was uneventful and we got back around 7:30 p.m.
Today is obviously a rest day. I’m also donating blood later this morning.
2021 St. George Marathon
4:03:54
516th/1,417 women
1,361st/3,208 overall
This one is definitely on the list of races I’d do again! It’s a bit out of the way to be a regular race. But the organization is top-notch and you can tell the race directors are runners by all the little touches — a race clock and port-o-potties at EVERY mile marker, tons of aid stations, volunteers with Icy Hot and Vaseline at them all, wet hand towels at mile 25 and again at the finish to wipe off all the sweat, Gatorade and sticky gels you’ve spilled on yourself, just to name a few. And the views are unreal!
A Simple Running Log 