alexr_rwx | race results: the 2009 Indianapolis Monumental Marathon!

Yesterday morning, Lindsey

lindseykuper and I ran the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon!

(you can read her account of the adventure over on her journal)

Upshot: we both ran pretty well! It was a lovely day for racing, and I got a personal best: 4:01:26. Lindsey was just a few minutes off her PR time; strong showing!

I keep saying this, but: next time, I'll totally break four hours!

It went really well! On Friday afternoon, after we were done teaching our respective labs, we drove up to the city. I like downtown Indianapolis. There were ticket scalpers out, working hard on selling Pacers tickets, there was traffic, there were people out hollering, and there were big buildings all around. I've gotten to the point where more urban settings are comfortable, I suppose.

And the hotel was great! It was just a few blocks from the race's start/finish, everybody there was really friendly, and they let us keep our car parked and our bags checked until we were done with the race. Very convenient.

So in the morning, we got up and had breakfast, with plenty of time to get over to the starting line. It was a beautiful day for a race; not very cold at all, clear skies. Everybody seemed relatively relaxed. We found our respective pace groups and stood around in that way that you stand around near the starting line of a road race.

My pace group leader was great! Betty Funkhouser, who's a 52-year-old middle-school teacher and track coach. Maybe I'll be as fast as her when I'm 52! She was super-energetic, hollering the whole way -- and she wanted the group to holler back. "What mile are we on?!" "Relax your shoulders, run tall!" (etc) There were maybe a dozen or twenty people running in that pack, and people were really friendly, like people are at a road race. At least half of them asked me about my crazy footwear. I did quite a lot of VFF-explaining that day; people seem to buy the idea in theory, or at least not think that it's outright wrong.

Indianapolis turns out to be really pretty. As we left Downtown, we got out into some neighborhoods, and there were Indianapolitans out to cheer, give us water and powerade, and play music. There were several bands: a marching band doing some funky percussion, maybe a younger school jazz ensemble, some guys playing blues on a front porch, and a small child with a harmonica standing in a front yard. And it ended up being pretty warm: I took off my long-sleeved shirt before too long, and didn't wear the gloves at all. The only unpleasant part about the environment was that there was a fairly strong headwind for a lot of the race.

Oh, and bizarrely, there was this one guy -- a lanky man with a scruffy beard, a big broad hat and a knowing grin -- who somehow managed to be standing by the side of the road cheering at roughly every mile, for the middle half of the race. We theorized that he was actually quintuplets; it was really strange, and he knew it! It must have taken a fair amount of planning to do this.

So while running, I didn't feel particularly frisky, but I did manage to keep things steady the whole way. In previous races, I'd ended up having to take some unplanned walk breaks towards the end, but not this time! As the miles rolled by, I was pretty sure that I'd PR, and I even expected that once I got close, I'd be able to kick it in and break four hours.

Around mile 19, still feeling strong, I started to edge ahead of the pace group. I was thinking that at mile 20, it was just like two loops around the IU campus, and that's just not that far! I could speed up for six miles, right? This was the point where people started to drop off and have to walk. The headwind was strong, and the last six or seven miles of a marathon can be quite daunting. But I kept on trucking!

Around mile 23, Betty (with hardly anybody still with her) caught up with and gradually passed me. I was still imagining that I'd have some kick as I got to the end. A guy in his twenties was running along at about my (slowing) pace, looked frustrated with himself, and announced, "fuck it, let's do this!" -- and ran off. Which was awesome.

I didn't have that much kick left. I did run it all the way in, but those last few miles seemed really long. In my defense, I wasn't exactly sure when I had crossed the start line, so there was some question, as I approached the finish line with the clock saying 4:03, how much of an offset I had to get in under four hours.

But! That's still a five-minute PR for me, and I brought it in fairly gracefully. I'll take it!

After I made my way across the finish line, I sat for a minute, had a banana and a bagel and some sports drinks, and then hobbled back to the race course to cheer for Lindsey, who ran it in pretty soon thereafter. I managed to recruit some nice bystanders to cheer especially loud for her as she came in. And once we found each other again by the finish line, we gingerly shuffled around, ate more post-race food, had to explain my footwear a few more times, and then wandered back to the hotel and to Bloomington. And then there was a lot of eating and sleeping (and AI homework, in Lindsey's case).

And that's the story!