Maine Coast Marathon: Big Goal Met Or No?

It was a splendid day... and sooooo close

At the finish of the Maine Coast Marathon. Every ounce of energy expended. Photo by Amber Guilbeault.

It’s hard to believe 18 weeks have passed since I started training for this morning’s race. So much life lived, so many epochal events, and the training was a wonderful throughline for them all. I’m grateful for that, and for the amazing community of friends I get to train with (they’re like family at this point), and the fiancee who is as supportive of my running as all parts of my life, my kids, friends, colleagues, and this body God put me in that puts up with so much and has held up so well. And this, friends, is the kind of outpouring of sentimentality Amber had to listen to on the whole drive back from Wells, Maine, where I ran the Maine Coast Marathon this morning. Me getting all misty-eyed at the smallest things. As I explained to her, I tend to ride that soup of chemicals a long, difficult race forces your body to produce right into pure schmaltz. It’s lovely. By tomorrow homeostasis will have kicked in and balanced this high by leaving me depressed, sore, and exhausted. C’est la vie. It’s worth it.

So what happened? Did I achieve my stretch goal of outrunning my almost-43-year-old self’s marathon PR from Boston 2013? Alas, this almost 54-year-old did not run a 2:58:43 today. But … I did run 3:00:30 on a course that I thought was pretty challenging in spots (somewhere I think around mile 23 there’s a steep hill that dumps you onto a sandy trail on the top that gets sandier and sandier for about a half mile until you get back onto a road!). It is my second-fastest marathon time ever, and fastest over age 50, and I think I ran it pretty darn well. Managed nutrition and pre-race prep well, did not bonk, still had my mental game all the way through. I didn’t go off a cliff pacewise, just lost a battle of attrition. And there was no mile during that gradual slowdown that I wasn’t still pushing. I ran it as hard and well as I could, and while my heart, lungs, and head were still in the game, my legs were cooked and couldn’t go any faster. I can live with that.

My official stats were:

• 35th out of 632 overall

• 31st out of 370 for men

• 3rd out of males age 50-59 - podium!

The weather was splendid. Forty-five at the start and 54 at the finish, blue skies tending toward cloudy by the end. A light breeze with some heavier headwinds in stretches, but nothing to complain about. Lovely scenery, coastal views then inland for rolling hills and Maine backroads, then back down the coast to finish.

I’ll post my splits at the end of this, but basically I ran around 6:45 for the first 15 miles and felt really strong. Heartrate was good, breathing even and comfortable. I’m sure I wasn’t overrunning it. After that (and a really weird set of buttonhook turns in a parking lot that felt like running a maze) it felt like work to hold the pace and I drifted into the low 6:50 range. Then at mile 23 (and maybe this is where the hill and the sand were (?), I put a big effort in to hit 7:09 and after that there wasn’t a lot left. The next mile was 7:02, then a hill on mile 25 knocked me back to 7:22. I knew I was going to be close to 3:00 and gave it every ounce coming down the backside of that hill and into mile 26 and kept praying for one last mile of 6:45 pace to appear. It did not. I managed 7:04 for mile 26 and then 6:59 for my “sprint” to the finish.

Again, did I hit the goal? Nah. I would have liked to, but it was arbitrary to begin with. Just as the notion of sub-three-hours being a great time and not sub-three-hours is less so is kind of arbitrary. On the other hand, I think goals are important. Even arbitrary goals. As long as there’s a non-arbitrary point underneath them. Mine is this: chasing a three-hour marathon time is challenging, engaging, and complex. It requires good training and good nutrition choices, which keeps me fit. I can tell you from experience, without a big goal, I very quickly get very unfit. This game also keeps me mentally sound. An audacious race goal gives the little anxiety puppy in my head something to chew on at three in the morning that isn’t too serious, like so much of what circles your head in those dark nights of the soul is.

So I’ll keep setting these goals, because they work for me. And from that perspective, maybe today’s outcome was the best of all possible ones (to riff on Voltaire’s Pangloss character from Candide). I ran a time I feel proud of and which represents fairly where I hoped my fitness was at. And I almost got to the 2:58:43 mark. Amber suggested as we were driving back that on a different course, a flatter faster course, I would have done it for sure. I nodded sagely and with the appropriate humility, and said, “maybe.” But, of course, I was thinking, alright, “let’s find out.”

Fall marathon anyone?