Marathon Man

Marathon Man

Plus a couple of bonus graphs of my speed throughout the race! This is measured in minutes per kilometer, so the higher the line, the slower I was running. You can see that I had a big spike five kilometers into the race — this is where an unfortunately bottleneck in the course forced us all to stop and walk for about 40 seconds. The effect was longer than that, since it takes quite a long time for the runners to reposition themselves in well-spaced, comfortably paced groupings.

Speed (minutes per kilometer) for 2009

Compared to 2008, you can see that I was quite a bit more consistent.

Speed (minutes per kilometer) for 2008

The marathon adventure begins with the Marathon Expo at Porte de Versailles to exchange my doctor’s note for a bib. Normally, I go on Friday evening and there’s no line at all. This year, I went at noon on Saturday and I had to wait in a line, but it moved very quickly.

One of the sponsors this year was L’Oréal, with flyers of Matthew Fox touting the Turbo Booster anti-fatigue cream. He’ll never give up his live-hard-and-party-hard lifestyle, but it doesn’t mean he can’t have beautifully airbrushed skin that even Liz Taylor would giggle at. The marathon volunteer put one in my gift bag, then looked at me and put in a second sample. The other goodies were a sponge, a full bottle of Pétrole Hahn shampoo (which I quite like, actually!), and some sort of candy bar.

For the marathon, I got up at 6h00, so I could eat and digest my oatmeal before the start of the race. I had a small weak coffee, but mostly sipped water, listened to some music, and prepared a little bag for the finish line (Mr. Dragon was coming to pick me up). I got dressed, taking along a long-sleeve flannel shirt destined to be “donated”.

I left the house at 7h45, and metroed up to the Arc de Triomphe, where I took advantage of the open air urinals (to lighten the load!) and entered the cattle gates at 8h30. I was in the violet area, which is the group targetting 3h45.

At 8h35, the wheelchair athletes take off. At this point, I was shifting from foot to foot, suddenly realizing that I was supposed to be running a marathon just now. Last year, I trained pretty strictly and everything was on schedule and prepared (until I hurt my ankle two weeks before). This year, I missed almost all of February because of work, and most of the beginning of March.

And at 8h45, we were off!

This year, I was going to attempt to keep my goal pace during the entire race, especially taking the first 12 kilometers very easy. I took water every five kilometers, except at 15km, where I took a banana instead, and somewhere in the 30km range, where they handed me a cup of some blue goo energy drink.

I kept my pace or close (around 5:20 per kilomter) pretty much throughout the entire race. There were a couple faster kilometers, and a few kilometers that approached 6 minutes.

At 33 kilometers, I “bonked”, or “hit the wall”. This is when everything starts to hurt and fall apart. I didn’t get the sparkly colours this year.

Folklore says this is because the muscles used the glycogen stored in them and throughout the body for short-term endurance energy. The human body can only store about 2000 kilocalories of glycogen (about a day’s worth of energy), and running consumes about 100 kilocalories a mile, so after 20 miles (32km), your body no longer has access to its easiest, habitual energy source. This is why it’s important to eat so many carbs in the three days before the race — to maximize the glycogen stored in the muscles.

The real scientific reason, however, for falling apart at 33km into a race is: you just ran 33 effing kilometers, you stupid nutjob. Compare and constrast with all the people that didn’t. They’re just fine, aren’t they? Experiment validated and closed.

The nice thing about passing the 33 kilometer sign, however, is that you’re in single digits for kilometers remaining. I’m not sure that you recover from bonking, and I didn’t manage to get my pace back close to the 5:20 km that I planned, but it seemed to get slightly easier and I kept on as best as I could.

I mostly proud of the fact that I didn’t stop running once (except for a short walking bottleneck at Bastille, and a 2 second stop at the water station at 35km). For the most part I stayed consistent and strong throughout the race.

The last kilometer, I pushed a bit harder. A woman in pink passed me slowly on the left, and started to sob. Serious, shoulder-shaking sobs, but she didn’t slow down. For a couple of seconds, I wondered why… then it infected me too. It wasn’t sadness, or pain, or exhaustion (well, maybe a bit). I’m not even sure why — maybe after pushing yourself so close to the edge, where it’s no longer even physical exertion, and then coming up to the end, the last 195 metres after 42 kilometers, with the crowd and the big inflated finish line, and not really even knowing what it meant.

They shooed us to continue after the finish line; there are hundreds more people arriving every minute. They snipped the chip from my shoe, I raised my hands for someone to scrawl a line across my number and someone else handed me a medal and a warm poncho, and I shambled down the long avenue, back towards the Arc de Triomphe.