Lincoln Marathon report

I should start out this race blog entry by mentioning how wonderful of a job the Lincoln Track Club does with this race.  They were able to cram 10,000 people into a couple of blocks and make everything work smoothly from start to finish.  This race has always seemed important to me too, since both of my parents have run the full marathon here a few times.  As a kid, this was the biggest event in the world, as I understood things.  I'm really glad they're still doing it and doing it well.

So,

Whitey white white

I woke up at about 4:45 on race morning and threw open the shades to ball lightning and sideways rain.  My initial fear was that the race would be cancelled and I would have to drive back to Minnesota empty handed.  I monitored the weather channel, weather.com and looked out the window to triangulate my meteorological efforts.  As per my expert radar image interpretation, the thundery/lightningy stuff moved past mostly by 5:45, and by 6 it wasn't even raining anymore.  I made all kinds of jokes about how rapidly the weather changes in the plains, but I won't regurgitate any of those here.  You're welcome. 

Now it's race time.  They didn't have corrals, but that some serious pace group leaders, and people lined up where they needed to be without threat of arrest, and I didn't have to push any 40 year-olds with Fuel Belts out of the way to get to the front.  I knew the guy who had won the last two years, Sammy Rotich was there, but not what sort of shape he might be in - and I didn't know who else might be lurking, since the prize money was pretty good. 

I decided to get an answer to these questions right off the bat.  I jumped to the front from the gun, and Rotich was the only one to come along.  He had that smooth, long Kenyan stride, so it looked like he was hardly working as I tried to size him up and decided what to do next.  We came through the mile a little under 5 minutes, and he was content to run side by side.  By two miles we had slowed down some, so I decided to test the waters a little bit, while getting back to a solid pace.  We turned up a long hill, and I made a little acceleration, which received no response.  I used the crowd (amazing community turnout) to gauge the size of my lead - using the cheers for myself, and then listening for the cheers for Rotich.  By 5 miles, I couldn't hear anything behind me, and assumed that I had a pretty decent lead,  I was wary, however of the rest of the course, which turned uphill mostly and back into more of headwind.  I expected somebody had decided to play the first half safe, and maybe a crew would group up to come get me.  It's good to be paranoid when you're leading.  I was able to hold pace until about 11 miles, before the wind was really in my face, and I knew I had the race in the bag.  I finished in 1:06:49, not a time I'm pumped about, with the wind, hills, and 90% humidity, I'm satisfied.  I'm also glad I didn't have to really push hard and wear myself out too much, since I'm planning to do another half next week and the Grandma's in a month.  I should be ready to do some serious training and hopefully rip off a good one in Fargo and an even better one in Duluth.

My first race-winning-roses, I wasn't sure what to do with them