Big D Texas Marathon, the Technicalities

Now that I’ve told you the story about the day itself, I want to post specifically about the technical details of the race – partly for my running nerd friends and partly to help myself remember. Here’s all the details about my pace, heart rate, GU intake, water stops, etc.

Before the race even began my heart rate was higher than normal. 103 just standing in the start line, clearly I was nervous.

Miles 1-3: Super tough, heart rate 180…way too high to sustain

Mile 4: Heart rate leveled off to 160, much better.

Mile 5: GU #1, with caffiene; heart rate maintained between 160-170. About 10 beats per minute higher than my training runs

Mile 11: GU #2, without caffiene; started raining

Mile 13: Heart rate 165; 13.1 split 2:15.58, pace 10:23 minutes/mile

Mile 15: GU #3, without caffiene

Mile 20: GU #4, with caffiene

Mile 23: GU #5, without caffiene, stopped raining, heart rate started to inch up, slowed pace to control HR

Mile 26: second 13.1 split 2:19.05, 10:31 minutes/mile; total time 4:35.03

I stopped at every drink station and drank water – except the last one. At that point, it was all sloshing around in my stomach.

I run with a SPI Belt which I love but it doesn’t have a place for GU that is easily accessible so I safety pinned the tabs of my GUs to the band, as I needed them I could just rip them off. This seemed like a good plan until it started raining and my hands were wet. GU is very hard to open with wet hands. Also they bounced around quite a bit which annoyed me for the first 9 miles. I might need to look into other fuel belt options or maybe I can modify my current one to accomodate the GU.

355th of 689 finishers
21st of 51 finishers, in the 30-34 female age group

I don’t have a running GPS so I don’t have any idea what my mile splits were, a situation I think I’m about to remedy. Does anyone have a favorite make/model? Any buying advice?

1 thought on “Big D Texas Marathon, the Technicalities”

Comments are closed.