We did it! We finished the whole 26.2 miles of the LA Marathon yesterday, and I can still walk! Actually, I fee pretty good. My legs are super tired, and a bit sore, but not so bad that I can’t go down stairs or bend over and touch my toes. I guess staying in half marathon shape really does mean you can do a (slow) marathon at the drop of a hat. We paced our friend Bill for most of the course – at least once we caught up with him around mile nine. Considering he had done NO training, he made the foolish choice to go out running 10-minute miles versus oh, I don’t know, WALKING, say, fifteen minute miles and by the time we found him was already running out of gas. Through a combination of chitchat and haranguing, we made it to mile nineteen, where he ran smack into the infamous wall that marathoners talk abut hitting and fell apart. The last seven miles were like pulling teeth with Novocain, only a lot slower – our pace averaged something like 22 minutes a mile at the end. We finally crossed the finish line more than seven hours after we started, but we did manage to finish it running – not fast, mind you, but definitely not walking, either. That time was more than two hours longer than I’ve ever been on a marathon course before, and let me tell you it’s HARD WORK being on your feet pounding asphalt that long! Still, we got our medals and Bill can say that he has now done 22 straight LA Marathons. And although I’ve said it before, this really was my last time doing the course. I’ve run LA four times now, every time on a different course and that’s enough for me.
The course this year was new: the LA Marathon is under new management (the Devine Company) and it is a definite improvement over the last old course. First off, it was a point-to-point course, starting at Universal City and ending downtown. Secondly, you could get to the start and/or the finish via the red line (and the Metro was free if you had a race number) so parking and attendant hassles were kept to a minimum. We parked at the finish downtown and took the red line to the start, a good choice as we were pretty pooped at the end so it was nice to jump (well, not jump exactly, more like crawl) into the car and go straight home. The course wound its way through lots of neighborhoods, and there were several entertainment stops along the way (and God bless them, they kept the entertainment up all day, even for the back-of-the-pack folks) that broke up the tedium. I especially liked that the start was on a very wide boulevard, so there was no feeling of being trampled as there has been in former years.
Being so far back was an experience – first off, I learned that there are a whole lot of people who slug out the course in eight plus hours! At seven and a half hours, we were far from the last! The water stops in the early part of the race were well-stocked, but towards the end less so – several of the water stops were using L.A. city water (ou can tell the difference, trust me) but the volunteers stuck it out and were still there late in the afternoon. We saw a lot of Students Run L.A. kids back there, and their determination to keep going was neat to see. Some folks (kids and adults) were sidelined and needed medical help (it got pretty warm and dehydration was a problem) but most everybody kept plugging along. Our friend Sumalee told me early on that she had read somewhere that only 440,000 Americans complete a marathon in a year. Too bad it’s such a small number. It’s a challenge, for sure, but the feeling of satisfaction you get when you cross the finish is something that can’t be described. And I can now say that it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you go, it’s still a really cool feeling.
Congrats to all of our friends who ran and especially to Bill for having the stubborn tenacity to keep coming out and taking such a beating every year for 22 years and to Valerie who completed her FIRST marathon a whol hour faster than she expected. I, for one, am watching it on TV next year. Unless I decide to run it again, of course.