2023 PDX Marathon Race Report

-

 


TLDR

I got a 04:09:41 time which means I averaged a 9:31 min/mile the entire way. Overall Place was 882 out of 2646 competitors, 661 out of 1650 males, and 99 out of 225 in my age group. 

My goal was simply to PR for the course and to finish strong (which I did). My stretch goal was sub 4 hours. I got a little greedy towards the end and it probably cost me at least 10 minutes of time on the back end. I'm still salty about it, but sometimes you need to be a little greedy to reach for the stretch goals.

 If you would like to read about it, here's how I got there:

 

Training Summary

 

Training was… sub-optimal. Had a health scare at the beginning of training (read about it here), then dealt with mild runners’ knee for the better part of a month. Glad I took it easy during my minor injury, otherwise it could have gotten worse.

 

While not running, I learned to really emphasize PT exercises to resolve any muscle imbalances in my body. I figure those imbalances were what caused my knee pain. 

 

I didn't want to just sit around and do nothing, so I supplemented my lack of running during the month of July with a ton of rowing on my row machine. I wanted to maintain my fitness while my knee was healing and while I was trying to find a good set of PT exercises to incorporate into a daily routine. 

 

As August rolled around, I eased into more volume while keeping up with rowing to make sure I was going to be fit for the Hood to Coast Relay (HTC). I did a few harder efforts to make sure my knee could handle the extra load.

HTC wasn’t quite an A level race for me, but it wasn’t simply a “fun run” either. I did the best I could to push it as hard as I reasonably could without sabotaging my ability to put in the miles afterwards. I did a recovery run Sunday after HTC but took Monday off so I could reset.

The lack of a Sunday long run as what made HTC weekend look a little low, and then ditto for Labor Day weekend where we went out of town, and I couldn’t get any runs during that weekend.

The Monday of Labor Day was a free day, so I was able to make it up and get in a long run. Combine that with my typical Sunday long run and now it looks like I put in a bunch of extra miles. The reality is that HTC and Labor weekend need to be taken together and averaged out. If you do that, then my volume stays at around 60-70 km/week.

Running out of time, I only had 2 weeks left before race day so made the effort to do my 20 miler before my taper began. The run felt great and finished strong towards the end. 

Total Volume: ~900 km combined running and rowing.

Race Report

I typically use a 4-hour marathon as a good gauge of where I’m at, but this time I told myself to “go by feel,” try to stay at a comfortable pace and have an even effort no matter what everyone else around me was doing. I wasn’t going to strain myself to keep up pace going uphill, and conversely, if I naturally sped up on the downhills, I wouldn’t try to fight gravity to slow down to any particular pace. 


  I felt good at the half, with a split time of around 1:55, which put me in contention for sub-4-hour marathon time. (in previous years, I had hit the halfway mark at around 2:15)

The 3rd quarter of the race is where everything usually fell apart. There’s an overpass over HWY 99E that gets me over into East Moreland and essentially a long, slow uphill up to and around Reed College. This is where Marathon Dreams go to die. And it’s not just me. It’s a struggle for most people in this area.

I had major cramps here in 2019 and again almost in the same spot in 2022. This year I came into it a little extra strength from my rowing and my PT exercises that my quads, calves, and hamstrings held up. 

 


I was extremely happy to leave Reed College and East Moreland intact. I knew I was out of the woods when I crossed the overpass again to leave East Moreland.

The course took me now to West Moreland with a beautiful, beautiful gentle downhill straight away at around mile 22. Feeling like I had been holding back most of this time, I turned on my music and opened my stride to celebrate getting this far without bonking. 

Of course, West Moreland wouldn’t let me out that easy—once I turned west there was a second series of hills around mile 23 and that’s where my calves betrayed me. In an ironic twist, the act of slowing down to conserve my energy going up the hill was what caused a cramp in both my calves.


Now I am quite familiar with this feeling. I felt it in a bad way during my first few half marathons, and during my first marathon in 2019. Back during those days, it was game over to me. I basically rolled over and died, limping to the end because I was too stubborn to take a DNF.

I was in the middle of the road so I couldn’t grab onto anything so down I went and hit the ground. A passerby saw me and offered to help stretch out my calves. Now in 2023, I’m still too stubborn to take a DNF. Once I convinced my calves to extend and not stay perma-contracted, I walked over to a tree and spent a good minute or so stretching both my hamstrings and my calves and moved forward. I wasn’t going to let the pain take me to a place where I started reacting emotionally.

I would walk, speed up to a steady run until I could see the next aid station, then slow to a walk again as I took in more nutrition and water. I repeated this until I crossed over the burnside bridge and got back over to Naito Parkway, which was the last stretch before the finish line. With about a half mile to go, I went ahead and kicked to the finish. If I were to cramp again, then I would have fell over and crawled to the finish and I would have had one heck of a finish photo. Didn’t matter. Of course, that didn’t happen.

I caught up to one guy and I think we pretty much finished at the same time. As of this writing, I don’t have a finish photo yet.  

I finished in 4:09:41. The previous time on this course was over 5:25, so I PR-ed this course by over an hour. I PR-ed this distance by about 5 minutes (previous PR was Eugene Marathon in 2022).

Takeaways


  •  Given my summer and how I started my training block (see my Brugada Challenge post), just being able to be out on the course is reason enough to be happy with my performance.
  • I felt great running my easy pace and was even pacing ahead of the 3:50 pacers for most of the race. I wasn’t going to force myself to keep up with them, so I let them run ahead of me as I stopped and walked at all the aid stations to get water and nutrition. 

 f

  •       I know I’m not good enough to skip aid stations, especially on the approach to Reed College.
  •  I got greedy and went out too fast at mile 21/22. Immediately paid for it with that last hill coming out of west moreland. I’ll consider it a calculated risk that didn’t pay off. By mile 22 I knew I was going to PR the course. The downside is that I let my sub 4 time slip away with my cramps.
  • By this time, I’ve spent a ton of time working on both my calf and hamstring strength. And I will continue to do so. But the information I got from my cramps today means that to adjust my running form. My hamstrings and calves are overcompensating for a weakness somewhere else and I suspect its my glutes. The calves and hamstrings aren’t really meant to push off the ground, but they are forced to if the glutes aren’t doing their jobs. This is the next piece of the puzzle I’m hoping to figure out by next marathon.
  • If I solely went by heart rate, then I have rarely felt myself “Straining” to maintain any particular pace during this rate. The failure has always been biomechanical. Dovetailing from the last point. I need to have more structured training plans where I can hit faster paces and work on my running form and efficiency. Efficient doesn’t necessarily mean “faster” running – in my case it will mean running without unnecessary taxing my muscles.
  •  I need to emulate race conditions more. Really test out my legs on those longer runs. I only had one 20 miler this training block. I’m going to start incorporating more 15-18 mile long runs into my block and do them earlier. And on top of that mix in a few miles of threshold intensity in the middle of those long runs.
  •  Lastly, I think I finally know how to categorize my rowing efforts. They count as strength training and aerobic base building. But they are no replacement for quality work on the road. As for how to count the distance on the row machine, I will continue to consider row kilometers as “kilometers of easy running,” as they don’t replace quality efforts like the long run, thresholds, or intervals.

Well, I think that’s it. I don’t have any more races planned this year since its going to get cold and rainy soon. The October marathon officially ends my running “season” and I look forward to this off-season reflecting on the year, easing of the miles and doing a few different things to give my brain something else to work on.

I will have more thoughts coming soon. Thanks for reading.


Location: Portland, OR, USA

Popular posts from this blog

My Summer Training Block Part 1: Starting off with a fresh PR

-
    Hi everyone! Its been a minute. Work has been slow so I've been spending much of the summer running. The summer is going to come and go anyways, so might as well spend it building up a massive aerobic base 😎 In the interest of not being too long winded, I'll break this into parts. I've been meaning to post something about my Half Marathon anyways, so I'll start with a race report about the Foot Traffic Flat on July 4th.   My Training :    I didn't have any particular training for this race. I wanted to start incorporating track work , specifically 400m repeats when I can . Its summer but I guess the kids at the high school still do practice for sports on the field . If the track is being used , then I end up going the "Kofuzi " workout , which is 6x1 mile repeats with about 90 seconds of rest . (Kofuzi is this guy ) I wanted to train some speed in before I started slogging through marathon pace work .     Outside of the 400 m repeats or the 1 mi...
Read more

The Brugada Challenge

-
Image
How the Concert Started How My Evening Ended I wanted to write something clever for this blog post, but I think the pictures do a good enough job getting your attention. Here’s how i ended up in the hospital. I had collapsed in the middle of June at a Death Cab for Cutie concert. When the medics checked me out, they noticed an irregular heart rhythm suggesting that a heart attack was imminent.  An ambulance came and a second set of EMTs performed another EKG. Since it was at a concert venue, they thought maybe interference from the music or the instruments was skewing the measurements. I t wasn’t. The second EKG confirmed the irregular heart rhythm so they treated me as if I was at risk for a cardiac event. It was puzzling for them because I was an otherwise healthy middle aged man. How could I be at risk for a cardiac event? My evening went from “ Death Cab for Cutie ” to “ Really Expensive Cab to Hospital ”  Upon arrival at the ER they perform a third EKG, which was no diffe...
Read more

Why I Don't Care if a Movie has Plot Holes

-
Image
Most movies that come out nowadays are riddled with plot holes. A younger (and more annoying version of myself) would promptly make an effort to point them all out. I think I was going through a phase where I wanted to prove my intelligence by showing people that I was smarter than a particular movie. The easiest way of doing that was to rain on the parade of any and everyone who enjoyed a popular film. This insistence on pointing out plot holes isn't just unique to me, mind you. Many cinema fans have devoted a lot of time towards exposing plot holes. But as I get older, wiser,and hopefully less annoying, I've learned that plot holes (or the lack thereof) aren't what make a movie great or horrible. First lets take a look at a few examples:
Read more