race report

Well, that wasn’t a terrific day. I’ll make it brief.

The race
I woke on time, ate breakfast and made it to the start with plenty of time to spare, although I had to park about 2km away. The race started suprisinly on time, so surprisingly that I forgot to turn on my stop-watch. Bugger.

The first 10km were fine, with Monaghetti and his balloons bobbing along a few metres ahead of me. Then around 15km Mona had to duck off for a pee, which messed up everyone’s timing. I went through the half in 87 minutes, which was a touch faster than I’d anticipated. From 25km I had a nasty stitch, which I thought might hurt me, but I ran through it, breathing more deeply than I normally do.

From 30km onwards I started to feel nauseous. At 34km it got really bad, and I had to walk. From then on, it was a real struggle, with frequent walk breaks, and plenty of people overtaking me.

It was upsetting, humiliating, and one of the worst bits of running I’ve done. I struggled home in 3:10.

Post race
It didn’t get any better, post race. I was up at GC on my own, so had to struggle what felt like a km to the left luggage on my own. It took a LONG time. Then there was another 2km to the car. At that stage I had no drink or food and no money to buy anything. I also had the remains of a carbo gel stuck to my shorts and my left leg – looking really dodgy.

Later on I got locked out of the hotel. Then I lost my boarding pass for the flight home. To replace it, I needed to know my booking reference number, which meant a trip to an internet kiosk, which wasn’t where it was supposed to be, meaning I had to go through security twice. Then I couldn’t find a pen to write down the number. Then it turned out I was booked on the wrong flight anyway.

I should note: at this stage I was unbelievably tired and really struggling not to lose my temper.

Then, when trying to transfer my flight my credit card got declined. Then they couldn’t move it in the system, because I’d already checked in over the internet. Then I couldn’t sleep on the plane because I was I nauseous and cramping badly.

Apart from that, it was a nice day.

Thoughts
I don’t really want to think about this much. At the end I felt devastated. I still feel like I stuffed up, like maybe I should have been able to tough out the nausea. I also think that, while I was feeling better from the brochitis, maybe my system wasn’t quite up to the demands of running a 3 hour marathon.

With 24 hours to think about it, I guess I was due a bad marathon. I’ve had a good run of races in the last few years, but the marathon is a cruel, unpredictable race. That’s part of the challenge, and why we keep coming back.