Got a little time before I need to hit the road, so here’s my race weekend story and some random extra thoughts…
For background, my marathon #7 training was the same as with every other marathon - wasn’t doing anything differently - but felt SO much more difficult. Endurance felt fine, but I was having intense pain in spots where tendons connect to muscle that I’d never had before. My longest training run was 16 and it was so bad, I decided I’d just try to get to mile 13. A couple weeks before the race, a lab test indicated they have a rheumatoid autoimmune disease, which explains what was happening with my body, but I can’t get to a specialist to further define high disease/s or start treatment until next week. So I went into this race weekend undertrained, with my body actively trying to kill itself, and with no idea what to expect.
Thursday was rainy and my body was very, very achy: my feet were so sore just from lunch at Springs, expo, and grocery shopping. The 10K left me in a lot of pain, despite taking my slow, sweet time - my left knee started in with IT Band pain for the first time in years, both quad tendons were swollen and painful, and my hands and feet were not happy. I slow strolled through EP after the 10K with frequent stops to sit, and heat of the sun helped enormously - that was good information to learn. Slept 12 hours that night!
Spent Sat in my resort room, doing laundry and watching Endgame with a heating pad and felt decent before bed. Bundled up Sun with throwaway sweatpants and a fleece jacket over my thin capris, tee and light running jacket, plus gloves with heat packs tucked inside and kept my muscles and tendons nice and toasty until the marathon start. I would have liked to start running with the sweatpants still on, but they were too big and wouldn’t stay up when I ran, so had to ditch them. I put an ITB strap on the left to ward off more ITB knee pain.
I set a series of self-check points for my race:
1. Get through EP: still felt fine at that point, so decided to keep going. My legs were numb with cold, and I couldn’t feel my toes, but my hands were toasty!
2. get to MK: yes! Still could not feel my legs at all, so I honestly had no idea if I was in pain or not, which I wasn’t sure was a good or bad thing lol!
3. Get to the GF or Poly: this was the big reckoning - great places to exit and monorail back to my car, but if I opted to go on, it would be a long stretch to my next check in at AK… I was only just starting to have feeling in my legs and seemed okay, had plenty of energy, so I rolled the dice and kept going.
4. Get to AK: another major check point because I knew the next starch to BB would be tough under any circumstances. I almost stopped, just out of fear, but one of my friends texting me through the race said no, keep going, so I did.
5. Get to BB: mile 20, the pain hit. My feet were worse than the usual amount of marathon pain, my ankle tendons, especially. But much worse, my RIGHT knee started with stabbing IT Band pain! Texted my friend that I thought that was it for me and he told me to come up with a new strategy - my race brain needed that seed thought: I pulled over, swapped my ITB strap from left to right, changed my intervals from :30/:30 to :30/1:00 and that bought me about 4 miles of reduced knee pain. Coming out of BB, I also stopped at the med tent, where a med volunteer deeply rubbed Biofreeze into my knee and that helped a bunch.
6. FINISH IT: at 24, with about 15 minutes on the sweep, I knew I could slow down a bunch and still make it. My knee hurst a lot, my feet were angry, and my lower back joined the pain party, but once I hit DHS I was all smiles! My friend had an ice cold beer waiting for me when I entered EP and that went down a treat lol! WDW Marathon #7 DONE.
It seemed so unlikely to happen, I’ve really spent the last two days in disbelief. Like, did I really do that?! Yep, I did. It’s interesting to me that I didn’t suffer at all from undertaining endurance-wise: in that respect I felt great. Plenty of energy. And most of the rheumatoid pain stayed at bay… I did the unthinkable and took an Aleve pre-race, which I know helped (I also hydrated very, very well to offset the kidney hit.) I stopped for more pics than I usually do, made 2 more restroom stops than my usual 1, and enjoyed it all more than I ever have. It was a really, really good one to go out on, if it’s my last.
General thoughts:
Did my usual start from the very back of my corral for both races and never encountered any truly awful congestion. Only had a few seconds here and there that I needed to wait to resume my own pace.
Never felt the lack of volunteers - water stations worked beautifully!
AK CMs spectating get the prize for most enthusiastic, excited, motivational spectators on the course.
That finish line med tent has never been better run: I hope they can get the military medics to run it every race, because they turned what normally a confusing fiasco into a triage center of efficiency and precision.
Where I really felt the undertaining was the ITBand stuff. I’d normally have had more mileage on my own steeply cambered roads to better handle WDW’s insanely cambered roads.
The 10K and marathon medals feel so much lighter this time! I wore the 10K for hours and realized I didn’t have the neck pain I usually get from doing that. I love that!
Animal crackers in the snack box was a big plus.
I still hate the 90s theme, but you bet the marathon medal is being hung with pride.