Marathon Name and Date
Portland Marathon, October 4, 2009
My Finish Time
6 hours 55 minutes
How Many Marathons I've Completed
one
How I Trained for the Marathon
Trained with my wife on the Santa Fe Trail near our home in ColoAado Springs. Short training walks/runs were three miles and the longest was 16 miles. Due to blister problems, we never got to do a 20 mile training event. Both of us had done one half marathon (we did another as part of our training program) and we are not regular runners. We decided to do the event four months before the start and both have busy lives and demanding jobs. But we made sure to get a couple of weekday trainings in and one longer walk/run on the weekends. I believe we were undertrained but refused to let that stop us.
How I Did It
We completed this marathon through perseverance and determination, not because of athletic experience or ability. We read the Dave McGovern and Jeff Galloway books (highly recommended) and read Wendy Bumgardner's About.com marathon walking newsletter on a regular basis. Although we had never met them, we considered all three of these people our marathon mentors. We chose the Portland Marathon because it is walker friendly and welcoming to first timers. We decided to do the course at a steady pace and if we had anything left at the end, would then pick up the pace. Even though our natural paces were a little different, we also decided to stay together because we could motivate each other in the tough spots. We also met some great people along the route and these interludes made the time go faster. Plus, since we are from Colorado and not familiar with Portland, we used the scenery to distract us from blistered feet and aching legs. We even found the long stretch at the warehouse district interesting. And because we started at a reasonable pace and maintained that through the race, we had enough gas in the tank to make the last couple of miles our fastest of the day.
Lessons learned
- 1. Read and take the advice of Galloway, McGovern, Bumgardner.
- 2. Work harder and faster some of the time in training than you will ever have to do on race day.
- 3. On your first marathon, don't worry too much about the time. Once you finish, you are a marathoner and you can then put more emphasis on the time at your next event.
- 4. Start slower than you think you have to. We took this advice and felt stronger at the end than expected.
- 5. Make it a point to enjoy every bit of the experience: the people, the course, the scenery, and so forth.
- 6. Portland was a great choice for our first marathon.
