I did the Okinawa Marathon today. I finished with an official time of 4:02, but the course is 26.5 miles long and my Garmin 310xt says I did 26.2 miles in 4:00:38. I like the Garmin time better. My training partner finished with a 3:48 and a negative split. We stayed together for the first 18 miles and then I started having some difficulty and finally had major difficultly the last four miles where I spent more time walking than running. I don’t think I’ve experienced the level of pain I felt in my legs that last five miles ever in my life (and I’ve broken my pelvis in a bicycle race).

It don’t want to ever run a marathon that way again. I do, however, want to run a marathon again and in a such a way that I finish strong. That is the primary difficulty in running a race this long: figuring out a pacing strategy that gets you to the end without leaving too much time out on the road. I certainly was at the wrong end of the stick today for I was on schedule for a 3:45 until mile 18 and then it all fell apart. Aerobically, I felt fine but my legs were sending me pain signals I didn’t know existed. Even more interesting is that they were hurting in completely different ways that they would in my long runs during training preparing for the race. During those runs, my glutes would get very painful followed my my hamstrings. Today, neither of those muscle groups caused any problems. My knees and upper ankles were killing me today. Both IT bands acted up and created a great deal of irritation and I had cramps occur on the outsides of my lower legs above my ankles. I didn’t even know I had a muscle there because it’s never been an issue before during training.

I think the IT band issue cropped up because of my taper the last two weeks. Less running meant less stretching and they tightened up. For me, as long as I consistently stretch my IT bands after runs, they stay happy. Since I was running less, I was stretching less. I’ll remember to do more stretching next time during a major taper like this.

The course had a lot of hills and my training didn’t include any hill work. Consequently, I have some toenails in trouble tonight and I’m sure I’ll end up losing at least two of them.

As for the race itself, the organization and the fans were awesome. The Japanese do an excellent job of organizing sports events like these and this one was no different. Handling 11,000 athletes must be challenging and this organization did a great job. We had timely shuttle busses from the parking areas, clear staging pre-race, and smooth handling of medals and certificates at the conclusion of the race. Within two minutes of passing the finish line, I had a certificate with my name, finish time, active race time, and overall place in the race. They have the data handled very well.

Along the route, a multitude of Okinawans lined the course offering water, tea, brown sugar, salt, otter pops, soba noodles, candies, oranges, lemons, and bananas. The official race support had water every 5k, but there was plenty of water to be had from individuals along the course in between the official areas. Plenty of spray cans of an ‘icy hot’ type material were available for help with sore muscles. Unfortunately, the overspray sometimes would get in your eyes as you ran by and that stung (and not in a good way).

It was mostly fun but I’m looking forward to doing another one that is completely fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Triathlon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.