Ogden Marathon!!!
We were pretty worried when we pulled into Ogden yesterday afternoon, and it was raining and hailing! The weather forecast had said that it would clear up by Wednesday, but two days later, it was still bad! But it turned out to be a beautiful morning. They bussed us up the canyon at 4:45 am, even though the race didn't start until 7:00 - not sure why. It was much warmer than we had anticipated, even though the skies were clear. We waited by fire pits in the middle of some farmer's field, so we had to be careful about the "cow pies." The course was absolutely spectacular, especially coming down by pine view lake. Even though the course was advertised as downhill, there were some rollers and one small-ish uphill section that took me by surprise. I felt absolutely FANTASTIC for the first half of the run, and was trying to carefully pace myself so that I would have plenty of energy and strength to finish strong. I felt certain that I would be able to come across the finish line easily under four hours. But at mile 18, my legs quit! It was strangely reminiscent of the Mesquite Marathon! What a bummer. Mile 18 was where we hit the steepest of the downhill section of the canyon, and all I could do was shuffle along to the finish line. I'm not sure what went wrong. Both of my soleus muscles locked completely up, and my bad foot was cramped. Other than that, my energy levels felt great, and the rest of my legs were fine. But I could NOT get more than a shuffle out of my legs. So....I crossed the finish line at 4:07 - enough for a new PR for me, but far worse than I had anticipated. My garmin said I did 26.46 in 4:07:32, but my chip said 4:07:15. I placed 900 out of 2137 total, 301 out of 951 women, and 93rd in my division of 230. I would really like to do this race again, and hopefully figure out what went wrong, so I can remedy it! | 