No point going into details on this one – it was awful.  All that training and when it came to the big day it just wasn’t going to happen.  I have no idea why but I battled nausea and lightheadedness from 8k on.  When I tried to refuel it just made things worse.  Normally this is how I react when over heated but the temperatures actually remained a little cooler than called for, or at least I didn’t feel overly hot most of the time.  I have no reason, no explanation.  I just know that by the time I hit the half way mark the race had just become about finishing.  I’m happy I finished, it would have been easy to quit.  I knew I did not want to send that message to my children who met me at several spots to cheer me on.  But I am sad of course too.  Not so much about adding more than 20 minutes to my first marathon time.  More so because I missed the rush, that amazing feeling of racing and crossing a well-earned finish line.  I was envious of the people around me who were just so pleased to finish the course.

Here’s the irony… when I trained for my first marathon I honestly felt that my running became worse.  I was slower and seemed more prone to injury.  This time around I feel I became a much stronger runner, yet the race itself was much worse.

As always, it is good to look at the bigger picture to try to feel better.  In my training I ran my fastest km, fastest mile, fastest 10k, fastest 10 miler and fastest 30k.  For the first time I hit 200 km or more of training in a month.  In fact I hit that 3 months in a row.  I put in 100 more km of training than I did last time.  I guess I will work on focusing on these achievements.

There were two highlights of the weekend.  Evan ran an amazing personal best, finishing the 5k in 25:22, putting him in the top 1000 of a race with more than 8500 participants.  Luke ran his very first 5k and finished in an incredible 32:02 I am sooooo proud of them both!!!