NYC Marathon 2008

Its strange how sometimes you think you can be ready for a race but for some reason its just not your day. This was one of those races. I'll admit, my training wasn't the most rigorous this time around but I shouldn't have hurt as much as I did for this one.

This was surprisingly my least favorite marathon out of all the one's I've run. I blame it on many reasons but I believe a lot of it had to do with the training. I began my training shortly after moving to Astoria in Queens. Like most of NYC, Astoria is flat, covered in pavement, and lacks any sort of running park. This meant that Monday through Friday we had to run on the sidewalks through the city. Constantly stopping for cars and lights was a pain but the monotony of the runs was the worst part. I trained with my girlfriend and a mutual friend of ours every morning and no matter which new route we tried it all looked and felt the same. We managed to get out of Astoria on the weekends and did long runs in Central Park or along the West Side Highway which helped a lot. However, this just wasn't enough to keep my interest. On top of the boring training those particular 4 months were filled with plenty of non running activities. I sacrificed one long run to do an urban adventure race. Although I ran in between each point and did a half marathon the following day, none of it made up for the 18 miles I should have ran. I took a trip to Las Vegas the following month. I had a great time on the trip but missed another long run and several days to recover from the amount of drinking I did. Less than one month after that my older sister got married. I tried to get in a long run the day before the wedding but it had to be cut short to make our train.

Race day didn't treat us much better. Once again we were loaded onto a bus and driven to Staten Island where we arrived over 4 hours before the race. Normally a situation like this would be a minor annoyance but that day was freezing cold and windy. We brought several extra layers and managed to find a good spot to sit in an alcove but it wasn't enough. Both my girlfriend and I sat there literally shivering for nearly 3 hours until the sun rose. We arrived at the starting line excited, tired, and tight. Again I wanted to run a 3:40 marathon so my girlfriend would qualify for Boston so we started off fast, too fast. Its easy to get caught in the hype of the marathon and the excitement of the crowd and that's exactly what we did. After mile 6 we slowed down to a much more comfortable pace but the damage was already done. The week before the race I idiotically made a dive on a wooden gym floor during a volleyball and hurt my knee. It caught up to me by mile 10. The pain would come and go and was tolerable until mile 15 and for the first time in my life I thought about quitting during a race. My girlfriend talked me out of it and we kept going. The rest of the race was like most marathons, painful, and it kept getting worse. We crossed the finish line, barely, in 3:49 and it wasn't a pleasant run for either of us. It's a shame that this race left such a bad taste in my mouth. The NYC Marathon is supposed to be one of the greatest to run because of the crowd and the atmosphere. After the race I could barely remember anything after Brooklyn and that certainly isn't how I wanted it to be.

I can sit back now and point out a lot of things that went wrong with that race. I guess it's the nature of any sport. Everyone has bad days now and again. The only thing I can do now is to fix those mistakes and hope I wake up feeling good and ready for the next time.