Race Report
My friend V and I stayed at the Omni the night before the race so we could meet our running group the next morning and take the subway to the starting line together. We woke up at 5:30, met our group at 6:15 and arrived at the starting line at 7:15, an hour before our race was due to start.
This year’s race got off to a much better start than last year. Last year, we waited in the freezing cold for almost two hours, so this year, I came prepared. Like many other runners, I had on disposable layers. I felt bad contributing to the piles of clothes strewn about the starting line (which I hope gets donated), especially since we weren’t waiting nearly as long this year and it wasn’t nearly as cold as it was last year. (Seriously, it was so cold last year, I feared losing appendages to frostbite. Then, when the race actually started, it suddenly became blisteringly hot.) This year, it was fairly mild to warm for most of the race.
I was oddly tired right from the beginning, but managed to stay with my group, which on track for a 4:30 finish time, for 21 miles. Sadly, at mile 21, I hit a wall and had to slow down considerably. T met me at mile 22 though and said I was looking better than I did last year, when I started out way too fast and hit a wall at mile 15. The rest of the race was a painful blur, but I got myself through it with the promise that I would take a break from marathons after this one. Finished in 04:55:58 and felt miraculously better as soon as my foot crossed the finish line. Quickly devored a banana and some apple slices and was feeling fairly human by the time I made it back to the hotel, where T greeted me with some lovely flowers.
Plus, thanks to a prescient phone call from T, I didn’t get lost this year finding my way back to the hotel! Hurrah! (The last two years, I’ve desperately wandered around downtown LA, lost and confused, for half an hour after the race. This year, I was tempted to make the same wrong turn I’ve taken the last two times – I am nothing if not a creature of habit – but T wisely thought to call and navigate me back to the Omni.)