Lurker's Log

Murph_D

+1 Great block of training behind you, enjoy the reward.

mbarr

Thanks everyone tucked away in Paddy Murphy's drinking coffee and electrolytes with Anne and Declan, they're trying to scare me with horror stories! Can't wait to get running now, this time tomorrow it'll all be over

Myles Splitz

Best of luck M. Have a good one and remember as best you can to enjoy it (while cruising to a PB )

El Caballo

All the best tomorrow mbarr, have a good one

Ososlo

Have a wonderful first marathon experience M! You deserve to have a good one as the training has been savage. Now go reap the rewards. Can't wait to hear all about it!

tailgunner

All the best for tomorrow. Looking forward to the report!

Firedance

You're probably getting to the start - good luck Mark! You'll be fine

FBOT01

Well done, M. Great debut. Enjoy the rest of the trip!

Firedance

fantastic!!! so delighted for you Mark, hope the body is ok - off with you to the pub now to celebrate

aquinn

Brilliant going Mark. Well done.

Firedance

your tracker well done again!

MB Mark Barr
Finish time: 03:34:20
Split Passing time Time Speed
Start Marathon 09:10:47 00:00:00
5 KM Split 09:35:53 00:25:07 11.9 km/h
10 KM Split 10:00:32 00:49:46 12.2 km/h
15 KM Split 10:25:28 01:14:42 12 km/h
20 KM Split 10:50:18 01:39:32 12.1 km/h
Half Marathon Split 10:55:43 01:44:57 12.1 km/h
25 KM Split 11:15:20 02:04:34 12 km/h
30 KM Split 11:40:24 02:29:38 12 km/h
31 KM Split 11:45:27 02:34:41 11.9 km/h
33 KM Split 11:55:22 02:44:36 12.1 km/h
35 KM Split 12:05:21 02:54:35 12 km/h
37 KM Split 12:15:28 03:04:42 11.9 km/h
39 KM Split 12:26:22 03:15:36 11 km/h
40 KM Split 12:32:01 03:21:15 10.6 km/h
1 KM to go 12:39:52 03:29:06 9.1 km/h
Finish Marathon 12:45:06 03:34:20 11.5 km/h
Start time
09:10:47
Speed
11.8 km/h
Finished
12:45:06

annapr

Fantastic result, M... You've come a long way since we saw you in Ryan's after Jingle Bells!! Great debut!

denis b

Fair play Mark. Just noticed that your first 10km in the marathon was faster than your 10km pb on Page 1 :eek:

Enjoy the celebrations

Kennyg71

Great result today, well done.

Mrs Mc

Great result well done enjoy celebrations

Dubgal72

Really strong debut, well done! Hope you're enjoying the rehydration bit now

mbarr

Thanks so much everyone! Delighted with the result, hit my B target, and ran a very well paced 21 miles followed by 4 tough miles and 1 absolute nightmare. The support from on here is just incredible, I was thinking of everyone following on the tracker every 5k mat I ran over. Thanks to you all for the advice and encouragement. Someone recently posted in the random running questions thread asking what people get out of keeping a log here, it's a no-brainer for me, what an amazing and knowledgeable community you all are! Thanks to Meno for his amazing plan, I'll be using it again for DCM 2016 for sure.

I got to Rotterdam Saturday morning fairly smoothly, went to the expo and tried to minimise my time on my feet. Hit Paddy Murphy's pub so I would have something concrete to dream of during the marathon, and bumped into YoungAnne and hubby, had a great long chat about all things marathon/boards related. The watch reckons I walked 13 miles on Saturday, oops! One of the hazards of travelling to a marathon. My hostel (King Kong) was perfect, quite close to the start, great value, and they put on the breakfast buffet early on Sunday. I was wrecked Saturday from the travel and very early morning, so I had the perfect marathon-eve sleep, got to bed at 8pm, was asleep by 9 and slept through til 6am. Up for the buffet, and about 4 cups of coffee and before I knew it I was lining up at the start. I was in wave 2, got there pretty early and made my way up to near the front. A fella sang You'll Never Walk Alone, which as a Liverpool fan got me worked up, I actually started crying when the cannon went off! I had to have words with myself, far too soon to be blubbing and not good for the hydration. We were about ten minutes behind wave 1, I glanced around at the last minute and saw the 3:30 pacers a fair way behind me. I waited for them to catch up before crossing the line, I didn't want to be running with them and knowing I had to finish 30 seconds or so on front of them. Didn't turn out to be a problem anyway! They headed off at a mad clip, last I saw them was about mile 7. Decided to run my own race thank god, it would have gone very badly if I had tried to stick with them.

The weather was perfect, clear blue skies, cool (for the most part, it did warm up towards the middle of the day) and just the lightest of breezes. The early miles were great, I had to keep checking my watch to see if I was really running marathon pace, it felt so easy! I was spot on the splits through halfway, FBOTs 20 mile warmup followed by a 10k race comment was spinning around my head, it really was like a warm up. Loved every minute of the first 21 miles, no real hint of the pain to come. Looking back at my splits, there is a 7:31 mile around mile 18, it's possible that that did the damage. I was chasing the splits a bit, aware that I was a couple of seconds over, and stupidly speeding up when I saw the timing mat coming up to try to get the right side of the time. There are so few landmarks that make any sense to the mind in the second half of a marathon. In the first half you have 5k, 5 mile, 10k, 10 mile, half and then suddenly you have 13.1 miles on front of you with no way to think about the time remaining. After the half I tried to assemble some landmarks in my head, 13.1 onwards was the longest I've raced, past 14 and that's the longest I've run at MP, past 22 and that's the longest I've ever run.

I had been taking gels every 5k, just before the water stops, this seemed to work out well. Firedance's gel belt was perfect, thanks AM! I had absolutely no kit issues, everything just worked, which was wonderful and down to the advice from here to not try anything new on the day.

Mile 22 was where the wheels began to come off (I hate that phrase, it's so catchy that when the wheels do start coming off, it's the only thing you can think of. Oh no, the wheels are coming off!) As easy as MP felt earlier, it now felt inversely difficult. I did a double take when checking my pace, was I really running 8:30 min/miles? Tried to pick it up but it wasn't happening. I had been dying to ditch my hat for a few miles, I knew that would give me a bit of a boost, so I finally did around mile 23 and got a 30 second burst of enjoyment from the breeze on my head. Glad I hadn't brought my phone as I was in a throwing things away mood. Around here I started taking bananas, oranges, wine gums, and essentially anything people were handing out, and was incredibly grateful for it. The drinks stations every 5k seemed ridiculously frequent in the first half, suddenly seemed very very far apart indeed. I had been looking for an excuse to stop and walk for a while, and when a fellow doubled over and started vomiting directly on front of me I had to take violent evasive action, and used that to justify my first stretch of walking. I walked and ran for a bit, from 40k onwards it felt like I was walking constantly but looking at the splits it couldn't have been that much. Similar to my 22 mile run bonk, I had two speeds, almost MP and walking. Legs flooded with something, lactate? Never knew what that felt like, I have a definitive reference point now! I was all over the road for the last mile, my face felt all fuzzy, at first people were shouting at me to start running again, but once I got closer and they had a look in my eyes they just said sympathetic sounding things in dutch. I was disappointed with myself, was thinking if Firedance had been able to run she would have run the whole thing, and here I am able to run but choosing not to. I couldn't remember her boards name though, I was thinking it was Firedancer but that didn't sound right, fireplace, fireman, firestarter? 500 metres to go I realised that sub 3:35 was at risk if I continued at my current slow walk, so managed a 500 metre sprint in to the finish to put a veneer of respectability on my final mile or so. No tears on the finish line, I felt dead inside to be honest! No disappointment, no relief, just nothing. I think I was very very close to a DNF. Hobbled down the long finishers area and picked up my medal and a much needed isotonic drink. Beautiful medal. Wanted to lie down but knew that getting back up would be impossible. Paddy Murphy's pub was around 1k away, including an underpass. Lay down for a while, managed to get back up, I seemed to be in worse shape than virtually everyone else who finished. Somehow managed to make it to the pub, started crying a bit as my heineken was being poured, and it's like all the emotions that had been suspended through the pain hit me, joy, pride, awe, thirst.

Met up with Tang and his missus, and shortly after YoungAnne and her husband arrived, fantastic times all around. Delighted for Tang to have such a brilliant run, very well deserved. And Anne, running a negative split is such an awesome achievement in a marathon! Met snailsong and Marty and probably a few others but at that stage the heineken had gotten the better of me. Don't remember going back to the hostel which is probably just as well. I assume staff must have carried me up the 3 flights of stairs as there's just no way I managed to do that alone.

So I've run my first marathon, enjoyed the vast majority of it, finished in 3:34:20, and have lots to aim for in Dublin in October. Sub 3:30 was an ambitious target, I wasn't a million miles away but don't quite have the base I don't think. I love running to bits, can't wait to get on the road again and get working on building that! (but will manage my recovery conservatively!)

tang1

Great stuff M, delighted for you. You put the hard yards in and it paid off for you, enjoy the recovery & no doubt we'll be meeting in the Park in preparation for DCM for a run or two.

tailgunner

Well done, excellent time for a first marathon, and seriously gutsy of you to manage a sprint over the last 500m after the previous few miles. Loved the report!

jake1970

Well done M, a great debut marathon.
Take a bit of time off and enjoy the recovery.

chickey2

Great report and a fantastic first marathon!

Mrs Mc

Well done M you can now say you're officially a marathon runner and that's something to be proud of and a super time to go with it. Well done enjoyed the report enjoy the celebrations.

Kennyg71

Well done, great first Marathon, well done gritting out at the end, great result.

Singer

Great report! I've been looking forward to reading it since Sunday... well maybe not the bit about the last few miles, I kind of knew how that would go - in fact the entire report had a familiar sounding feel to it

It's great that you're raring to go post-marathon, though obviously enjoy your time off.

p.s. crying because the Heineken wasn't crafty enough? Pretty hardcore.

mbarr

Singer wrote: »

Great report! I've been looking forward to reading it since Sunday... well maybe not the bit about the last few miles, I kind of knew how that would go - in fact the entire report had a familiar sounding feel to it

I know, I was thinking that as I was busy hitting the wall, if there's one person who knows exactly what I'm feeling right now it's Singer. At the same time as ordering my first beer in the pub I ordered a rasher sandwich, because if I managed to escape the other lessons of your DCM15 experience I definitely wanted to pass out on my own terms!

Murph_D

Well done M. Don't think anything can prepare you for those last few miles the first time out, but you'll know what to expect next time. I blame that puker guy for knocking you off your stride. Super debut indeed.

annapr

Singer wrote: »

Great report! I've been looking forward to reading it since Sunday... well maybe not the bit about the last few miles, I kind of knew how that would go - in fact the entire report had a familiar sounding feel to it

It's great that you're raring to go post-marathon, though obviously enjoy your time off.

p.s. crying because the Heineken wasn't crafty enough? Pretty hardcore.

Liverpool fans just seem to cry a lot...

I thought the bit about the last few miles was brilliant... Completely captured the delirium that hits. I remember fbot throwing away his last gel in Berlin because it was 'weighing him down', thought of that reading about your hat...

That's a great debut M, sub 3:30 no bother to you in Dublin!

mbarr

annapr wrote: »

Liverpool fans just seem to cry a lot...

I thought the bit about the last few miles was brilliant... Completely captured the delirium that hits. I remember fbot throwing away his last gel in Berlin because it was 'weighing him down', thought of that reading about your hat...

That's a great debut M, sub 3:30 no bother to you in Dublin!

We have our reasons! So funny, I remember thinking everything would be fine if not for this fecking hat! As soon as it was gone I realised it wasn't the source of my woes and it was going to be a long few miles!

aquinn

Wow, what a tough few miles and then a sprint finish. An incredible first marathon time, well done Mark. Maybe next October more dialorite and less coffee in the morning. Super training and massive sleep stood to you.

mbarr

aquinn wrote: »

Wow, what a tough few miles and then a sprint finish. An incredible first marathon time, well done Mark. Maybe next October more dialorite and less coffee in the morning. Super training and massive sleep stood to you.

Thanks A, the more time that goes by the happier I am!

Progress on recovery:
Monday: Drunk in Amsterdam all day. hands and knees up and down stairs
Tuesday: Back to work, up stairs ok, down stairs sideways and one step at a time
Wednesday: Up stairs comfortably, down stairs normally but with support from handrail
Wednesday evening: Thinking about running but managing to resist. Gonna take the full week off. Headed to the Canaries on Friday, will be bringing the runners just in case!