Category: Running

In 2008 I pursued and accomplished a long held goal to run a Marathon. It was an exciting goal to achieve, and a surprising thing to choose to do more than once. But I did, next in Baltimore, and then in 2010 my third, in my home town of Huntington Beach, California… the Surf City Marathon. To me there are two primary motivations to signing up for such a race, and the first is obvious, to get myself up off of my lazy ass and run, especially having paid good money to do so! But the second is for the fun of the destination, running a race in a new city, and a new environment, can be an exhilarating undertaking that adds adventure and distracts from the pain, and makes the whole thing especially satisfying. And so, for most events, once is enough.

But the Surf City folks did something very smart. They created a special status for runners who completed their event three years in a row. These runners earned the distinction of being members of the Longboard Legacy Club. You ONLY earn your membership after three consecutive years running the event, AND you have to maintain having run three years in a row to keep your membership. It’s a trap to keep you running the same race. And it works. So what do Legacy Club members get in return? An additional t-shirt (long sleeves, some have been nice, others not so much), a small stick-on extra for your medal (sometimes, not always), and an exclusive separate entrance to the post-race beer line (almost always meaningless). But runners who enter races are by nature competitive, even if they have zero notion of actually WINNING the race, they want their medal and they’ll chase other ways to feel like they’ve distinguished themselves. And for me, since running Surf City provided a nice reason for an annual visit home I returned year after year. Sometimes I ran the full Marathon in Surf City four times (2010, 2011, 2012, 2016), and the Half Marathon five times (2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018).

Over the years, a number of traditions have developed around this annual race, along with many special memories. Being a visit home, meant it was also an opportunity to visit with old friends, and for years a collection of my closest would always join me for a carbo-loading meal at The Olde Spaghetti Factory in Newport Beach, a favorite restaurant of mine since childhood. I’ve also enjoyed great fan support, from my folks, but also from one of my closest friends since childhood, who would come out at both the start and finish to cheer me on and run the last couple hundred yards to the finish with me. I love that.

Sadly, this year my streak has ended. I have plans to run Ragnar So Cal in April, another event that has long been on my radar. And it just wasn’t in the books to make back to back trips for two races, and so, regretfully, I did not run Surf City this year, which would have been my 10th in a row. I’ve heard that I picked the right year to miss due to cold and rainy weather. But I know I’ll be back, and I’ll again be a Legacy Club Member, and next I’ll probably pursue that Beach Cities Challenge Medal as well!

So we were talking about Google Street View in our neighborhood, and Jennifer recalled seeing the Google Maps car drive by while on a run last fall. So I went looking for her and found her, forever immortalized running past 15917 Dolphin Drive. Way to go dear! (She’s not that blurry in person)

They were purchased with the expectation of a triumphant performance in the Marine Corps Marathon of 2010 that wasn’t meant to be. But they continued on over the next 95 weeks, plodding through 101 runs and a total of 632 miles. Among those runs would be three more marathons, including a triumphant PR at the OBX Marathon in 2001. A record that stands to this day and is unlikely to ever fall.

Already slated for retirement, they untimately failed. Worn soles, inside and out, and an exposed tack revelaed thier ultimate deterioration, fighting back against the feet they had carefully carried through so many miles.

A memorial service was held at their interment in the kitchen trash. Both my feet, left and right, were in attendance to pay their respects. Other survivors include thier frequent partners, four different pairs of running socks, a runner’s id/wallet velcro’d securely to the right shoe’s laces, and numerous timing tags carried through more than a half dozen races.

Farewell my running shoes, you’ve run your last mile and crossed that big finish line in the sky!

Here begins the long out and back, to Warner on PCH, then back to Warner again on the beach trail.

Shit, I liked it better going down.

Ok then, let’s do this!

Yesterday I ran the Baltimore Marathon. It was my second Marathon, and won’t be my last as I’m already signed up to run the Surf City Marathon in my hometown of Huntington Beach, California next February. Not quite a year ago in Richmond, my friend Jay and I accomplished our goal of running a marathon and we completed a 16-week training program to reach the goal of just finishing the race. During long runs in those weeks of training, Jay and I would frequently comment that if we reached our goal of completing our first marathon, it would certainly also be our last. And yet, within hours of completing that goal (we finished in 5:56:57), Jay was saying, “We could do better”, and the thought of doing another was planted.

Among the things that I really enjoyed about running Richmond was that it was a great way to see a city. How often can you tour a city, with police stopping traffic so that you can run down the middle of major roads, and with cheering fans lining the course offering high-fives, snacks, and beer? It is truly a unique experience, and the thought of taking such a running tour of other cities holds great appeal to me. Some marathoners pursue the goal of running a marathon in all 50 states. I don’t know that I’ll go that far, but I’ve learned to not rule anything out either.

My Runner’s World magazine, a Christmas gift from my wife following last year’s marathon, brings a monthly dose of motivation, and advertisements for marathons across the country. And from those ads, Baltimore stood out, mostly for being relatively nearby, and in July I made the commitment and registered for the race, along with friends and family who were going to run the Half-Marathon and the 5k.

I set my goal for Baltimore at 5 hours, an hour faster than Richmond, where just finishing had been the only goal. In a previous half-marathon and a 10-miler, I had found success at reaching my goal times by creating a Pace Tag which I pinned to my shirt to keep me on track. Having goal splits handy makes every single mile a race of it’s own. Make those mile splits, and you’ll reach the goal time for the whole race. To reach my 5 hour goal time in Baltimore required a pace of 11:27 per mile. That’s a very easy pace when doing shorter training runs, but I had no idea if I could maintain it for all 26.2 marathon miles.

Happily, I found that I could. And my day-after geek came out today wanting to compare my actual performance with the goal pace I had established. The below table shows my goal pace, goal time, actual splits, pace difference, actual time, and actual difference. Where I am ahead of my goal pace, the number is in green, and where I am behind my goal pace, the number is in red.

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Mile	Pace	Goal Time	Actual Split	Pace Diff	Actual Time	Difference
1	0:11:27	0:11:27	0:11:04	0:00:23	0:11:04	0:00:23
2	0:11:27	0:22:54	0:10:50	0:00:37	0:21:54	0:01:00
3	0:11:27	0:34:21	0:10:40	0:00:47	0:32:34	0:01:47
4	0:11:27	0:45:48	0:10:34	0:00:53	0:43:08	0:02:40
5	0:11:27	0:57:15	0:10:24	0:01:03	0:53:32	0:03:43
6	0:11:27	1:08:42	0:10:30	0:00:57	1:04:02	0:04:40
7	0:11:27	1:20:09	0:09:53	0:01:34	1:13:55	0:06:14
8	0:11:27	1:31:36	0:09:50	0:01:37	1:23:45	0:07:51
9	0:11:27	1:43:03	0:10:04	0:01:23	1:33:49	0:09:14
10	0:11:27	1:54:30	0:09:58	0:01:29	1:43:47	0:10:43
11	0:11:27	2:05:57	0:10:04	0:01:23	1:53:51	0:12:06
12	0:11:27	2:17:24	0:10:31	0:00:56	2:04:22	0:13:02
13	0:11:27	2:28:51	0:10:26	0:01:01	2:14:48	0:14:03
14	0:11:27	2:40:18	0:10:34	0:00:53	2:25:22	0:14:56
15	0:11:27	2:51:45	0:10:57	0:00:30	2:36:19	0:15:26
16	0:11:27	3:03:12	0:10:59	0:00:28	2:47:18	0:15:54
17	0:11:27	3:14:39	0:12:36	-0:01:09	2:59:54	0:14:45
18	0:11:27	3:26:06	0:11:33	-0:00:06	3:11:27	0:14:39
19	0:11:27	3:37:33	0:11:33	-0:00:06	3:23:00	0:14:33
20	0:11:27	3:49:00	0:12:13	-0:00:46	3:35:13	0:13:47
21	0:11:27	4:00:27	0:11:47	-0:00:20	3:47:00	0:13:27
22	0:11:27	4:11:54	0:11:49	-0:00:22	3:58:49	0:13:05
23	0:11:27	4:23:21	0:11:42	-0:00:15	4:10:31	0:12:50
24	0:11:27	4:34:48	0:11:57	-0:00:30	4:22:28	0:12:20
25	0:11:27	4:46:15	0:11:46	-0:00:19	4:34:14	0:12:01
26	0:11:27	4:57:42	0:11:09	0:00:18	4:45:23	0:12:19
26.2	0:02:18	5:00:00	0:05:03	-0:02:45	4:50:26	0:09:34

The race started uphill for the first 3.5 miles (see the elevation chart) As you can see I started steady and just ahead of pace and from miles 3 – 14 was enjoying the long downhill and running almost a minute ahead of my pace. By the time I had completed 16 miles, I was a almost 16 minutes ahead of my goal pace. There was a really great street party going on at mile 16, and at mile 17 I ran past the home of friends Phi and Sean, who lived up to their promise of having a mimosa waiting for me. By this point in the race I had eaten bananas, an orange, potato chips, pretzels, gold fish, vanilla power gel (gross), Skittles, and of course lots of water and Gatorade. But that mimosa went down better than any of it. Sean warned me that I was about to head into a not so great neighborhood, and suggested this knowledge may encourage me to pick up my pace (The Baltimore Sun had likewise been thoughtful enough to share information about where the marathon route intersected the worse areas of crime in the city). So I lost a minute enjoying that mimosa, and headed into the second hilly portion of the course, and as you can see, I began falling behind my goal pace, happily not by much, and not by enough to get behind the time I had banked in the first 16 miles. Miles 20 – 23 were the hardest, running around Lake Montebello, but then the course leveled and the long downhill to the finish line at the Inner Harbor began. The crowd grows, the cheers get louder, someone always seems to be offering a beer by this point, and the knowledge that the finish line is within reach provides a finishing surge. Jennifer, Colleen, and the neighborhood gals who had completed their 5k hours earlier were there at the end to see me finish, and I ended up right behind Jay who was finishing his half-marathon (he’ll join me again for his second marathon in February).

An explanation for the 5 minutes that this chart says it took me to run the final two-tenths of a mile, I promise I did not drop off that much. As I ran, I found an increasing gap between the point at which my Garmin was telling me I had hit a mile point, and the actual mile-marker for the race. First it was a tenth of a mile, eventually a quarter mile, and by the end my watch fully three tenths of a mile ahead of the actual mile markers. My only explanation is that the accumulated drifting from side to side along the race course added this extra distance. So the splits in this chart reflect my Garmin time, while the final result of 4:50:26 was my official race chip time. I forgot to stop the timer on my Garmin until I was in the chute after finishing, collecting my medal and a drink, but when I did it had my time at 4:51:20 for a distance of 26.56 miles.

Thanks Baltimore for the great running weather (overcast with some light rain, felt great), great fan support, and mostly to my family and friends who have turned running into an activity at which we motivate, participate, and celebrate together.