{"id":902,"date":"2010-03-22T15:58:41","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T22:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/?p=902"},"modified":"2010-03-29T11:25:56","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T18:25:56","slug":"stadium-to-sea-lama-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/2010\/03\/22\/stadium-to-sea-lama-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Stadium to Sea, LAMA 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the LA marathon and the start of a new course.\u00a0\u00a0The course traditionally starts downtown and runs in a loop, ending back downtown.\u00a0 (In 2007, they tried something new and started the course at Universal Studios and ended it downtown, but it wasn’t very popular, so they reverted to the old course last year.)\u00a0\u00a0The operating rights to the marathon were purchased by the owner of the Dodger’s recently and the course was drastically revised\u00a0 this year.\u00a0 It started at Dodger Stadium, ran through downtown, Hollywood,\u00a0Century City, Beverly Hills and\u00a0West LA before ending in Santa Monica.\u00a0\u00a0I enjoyed the new course, but I wish I’d felt better during the run!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sunday morning found me, T and Alfie in the car by 5:40am heading to Dodger Stadium for the 7:20am start time.\u00a0 We got caught in bumper to bumper traffic once we reached downtown and only made it on time thanks to T’s navigational brilliance and knowledge of secret streets in LA.\u00a0 Unfortunately, many other people weren’t as lucky, so the marathon organizers\u00a0ended up delaying the start time by 30 minutes\u00a0to allow other people to get there …even then, I’m not sure they all did.\u00a0 Traffic was a nightmare.<\/p>\n

With 25,000 runners, the start line was chaos, but my friends and I managed to find each other and start the race together.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I’d hydrated too well before the race, didn’t get there early enough to wait in the long bathroom lines,\u00a0and had to take a bathroom break at mile 10 (and again at mile 18).\u00a0 I never did catch up to them again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Encouraged by friends who are just faster than me, I did the first 10 miles too fast and was tired too early.\u00a0 I started slowing down by mile 15, at which time it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to make my 4:30 goal time, which I’d been on pace to do.\u00a0 Miles 15 through 20 were painful.\u00a0 I’d never wanted to give up on a marathon before, but I came close during this one.\u00a0 I had newish shoes that were giving me blisters, my knee hurt, my toes were sore from the impact of a largely downhill course, etc.\u00a0 I barely noticed the scenic course as I focused on just fininshing.\u00a0 On the upside, the weather was pretty nice for running.\u00a0 It could have been cooler, but it was more than I could have asked for in LA.\u00a0 Although Saturday was warm, Sunday remained lightly overcast all day.<\/p>\n

The mental fog lifted after mile 20, when I cleared the Veterans’ Administration and finally got onto San Vicente.\u00a0 I regularly run the stretch from San Vicente to Ocean, so the last six miles were nice and familiar.\u00a0 That gave me the boost I need to get across the finish line in 4:45:50.\u00a0 I didn’t meet my goal, but I did set a personal record so I was pretty happy…and thrilled to be done running!<\/p>\n

In case anyone’s still reading at this point,\u00a0for a great – and much less self-absorbed – recap of the race, the crowd support, and the course itself, check out this entry<\/a>.\u00a0 Also, this entry<\/a>\u00a0has a neat photo recap of the course and crowd.\u00a0 Lastly, this super cool site<\/a> lets you see how I did compared to everyone else.\u00a0 Because why bother doing anything unless you can do it better than someone else.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 =)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 This year marked the 25th anniversary of the LA marathon and the start of a new course.\u00a0\u00a0The course traditionally starts downtown and runs in a loop, ending back downtown.\u00a0 (In 2007, they tried something new and started the course at Universal Studios and ended it downtown, but it wasn’t very popular, so they reverted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-run-y-run"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sweetpea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}