What a wonderful day for a first Marathon!

This past Saturday I ran 2:32:22 to take 2nd at the Salt Lake City Marathon, it was a beautiful day with a few clouds and a starting temperature of about 49 degrees and a finishing temperature probably fairly close to 60. You couldn't have picked a nicer day to go out and run.

I am pleased with my performance and there isn't really anything that I would have liked to have changed or done differently in the race. Looking at my conditioning and seeing that there were some hills in the race I had thought that I should be able to run about 2:28. This was my first marathon but I have done a number of longer trail races and have been doing a 25 mile run pretty much every Monday morning for a few Months now at a 2:45-> 3:00 Marathon pace and train with 5 guys that have run mid to high 2:20's so I had a decent gauge on my conditioning.

My plan was fairly simple I wanted to average 5:40 pace for the 1/2 to 3/4's of the race and stay relaxed and hopefully have something extra in me and try to pick up the pace the last 6-8 miles if possible. I was able to average about 5:38 pace through the first 15 Miles which turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had thought mainly due to the number of sharp hills in the course so my splits were anywhere between 5:06 and 6:10 depending on how much uphill or downhill I had. I knew that Fritz Van De Kamp was in the race(He won in 2:28) and that if I planned on staying conservative that I didn't want to go out with him as a number of his races he has run 1:11/2:26 splits and that would be a little faster than I wanted to go so from the start I didn't try and go with him but ran about 1 minute behind him from mile 6 to 16 hoping that I could pick it up and make more of a race out of it at the end.

At Mile 19 which is about where I had hoped to pick it up I started getting light headed and thought to myself, I wonder if this is what bonking feels like? I quickly finished the sports gel that was in my hand and felt myself slowing. I didn't bonk but did end up slowing from about 5:40 to 6:05-6:10 pace and pretty much finished at that same pace. In many ways I felt like I was paying my dues at that point in the race as after all it was my first Marathon. I tried picking up my pace a few times but would find myself slowing and struggling a bit each time I tried to pick it up.

If you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together.

Reflecting on the race now for a couple days I have been thinking about the African proverb above. I was able to run far because of all of the support that I have had. I have a fairly sensitive stomach and don't usually consume much of anything on my training runs but it was nice to have Riley Cook (2:21PR) call me up the day before the race and talk nutrition with me for a while. Riley and Dave Olson(2:43PR) actually drove up to watch the race and took a bunch of nice pictures and handed me water about 4 different times during the race. Ben Van Beekum (2:26PR) drove me down to Salt Lake City before the race as he ran the Half Marathon that day. Not wanting to drive to SLC for packet pickup just to have to drive back to Ogden and then wake up earlier and drive back to SLC (~1hr drive) my CEO Dave Haynie(3:56PR) let Ben and I crash at his place as he had a couple spare beds. My Wife (2:07Half) ran my 3 kids around to their 3 soccer games while I was gone. That is just listing some of the people that helped support me on the race day. Training wise Riley and Dave have been injured for a while and Ben has been busy with school so most of my tempo and long runs the past few weeks I have been doing with Jon Heslop (2:39PR), Jason Holt (2:24PR) and Bryant Jensen(2:16PR). Its hard not to start name dropping as I really felt a lot of support from fellow runners and friends in the area getting ready for and during the race.

Final thoughts on the Marathon

I am definately going to have to run a few more marathons as I don't want to be known as Bret Ferrier (2:32PR) forever. That being said a couple people have asked me and I do prefer the trail races, the SLC Marathon was pretty and now I understand why a lot of ultra runners use Marathons as training runs as it was nice to see a lot of spectators out but the roads are pretty rough on my feet (See the tweet below for a pic).

I circled the blisters from today's #SLCMarathon. The blood drained out making them harder to see. I took 2nd in 2:32 pic.twitter.com/U820G6rVxt
— Bret Ferrier (@runxc1) April 19, 2014