Marathon Me

After getting my money’s worth in South Dakota, we got in the car for the 5.5 hour drive to Ames, Iowa. Ugh, what a long drive. Thankfully my brother-in-law is slightly crazy and actually enjoys driving, so when I gave my half-hearted offer to drive he declined and drove the whole way. Which is good, you know I like to stay legit with rental car agreements and all. Normally a 5.5 hour drive with a six year old wouldn’t be very fun, but thankfully we have “portable dvd playing technology”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, and if not you shouldn’t take any long car rides.

We arrive in Ames and head to eat, the first two places Hertz Never lost tried to take us to no longer exist, so we headed to a pizza place and get really average Chicago style pizza. Sunday I would be regretting this decision.

Race morning comes and it is cold and windy, but thankfully it isn’t raining. This race is very casual and pretty small. We all line up to get our bibs before the 6:30am start. This race, being on Mother’s Day, is free to all mom’s who have a photo of their kid. We get everyone signed up and then we mosey to the start 20 feet away and the race director says go. And we’re off.

The course is a very nice paved trail that goes around a river and has lots of trees. Very, very flat.

My legs are very stiff from yesterday and my gait is quite amusing, at least to myself. Both legs are so tight I kind of shift back and forth as if I didn’t have knees. My left leg takes a man pill about half a mile down the road and then it can bend properly and so now my gait is even funnier. It takes about 2 miles before my right leg gets warmed up and now I feel fairly good. I’m in the Top 4, but I plan on running about four hours today, so this would be a typically Fly and Die race for me. I was hoping for 3:10 or so yesterday and 4 today, neither of which happened.

At about mile 2.5 the leader turns right and we head off into a neighborhood. This seems wrong to me, but that’s where the arrow said to go, and I think there is no way I can wrong the wrong course two days in a row right? Wrong. About .75 miles down the road a bike comes flying by yelling the dreaded “You’re going the wrong way”. I think back to Planes, Trains and Automobiles and wonder how he knows where I’m going. But we turn around and head back to the course. Today we’ve only run 1.5 miles too far and so I feel happier.

The course is sort of a figure-8 loop that you go thru 5 times, which means you hit the start/finish lines 10 times. The good thing is that we won’t go off course the rest of the day as we’ve learned our lesson. It turns out the 25 mph winds had moved the arrow and that’s what sent the leader the wrong way and then like dutiful sheep we all followed. The hero on the bike got the sign fixed, but I don’t think anyone was missing that turn again.

About 7 miles into the race the pizza starts fighting with me, a quick stop under a bridge and a few mins later I’m back in the race. I see lots of 50 Staters, but I don’t know any of them, and we will have to jump in the car after I finish so we can get back to Omaha in time, so I won’t be meeting many of them today. So that’s a little disappointing as it would have been good to meet more of those guys.

The next two laps pass fairly uneventfully until I get sidetracked with another pit stop. Damn your black heart bad pizza! Stop off into the restrooms located conveniently at the start/finish. Business taken care of I settle in for the last 2 laps. 5 Lap courses get boring to me, no matter how long the laps are. I did a 50 miler that was four 12.5 mile loops and even that was boring. I’d like to not see the same thing any more than three times. But then I also like to complain.

I see Scott as I am starting the last half of the 4th loop and he gives me some flat coke. Tastes like nectar from the Gods. On the last loop Shelley and Christopher are there and snap a couple pics. I get a high-five from Christopher and am off again for the last damn lap. I so want to be done. I actually feel pretty good, I’m not sore, and I’m not that tired, but the extra mileage and the pit stops have killed my time and I know I have no shot at a 4 hour marathon and so I’d rather finish and go grab a burger and a beer..

The last section is uneventful and as I approach the finish I turn on the afterburners, I am going so fast I’m a blur, people can barely see me, cameras struggle to capture my image, people remark “whoa was that The Flash?”. No, it was just a bad photo.

Sorry about that.

What would you need after finishing a marathon? Well as Mr. Walken always said, “we need more cowbell”! The finishing medal is actually a cowbell. Christopher is happy, he finds a big stick and liberates the cowbell from me and happily runs off clanking away.

This race is called TIMTAM (This is more than a marathon), and just like South Dakota, for a few of us, it lived up to its name. Final distance 27.75 miles, finishing time around 4:11.

This race was very fun and if you need Iowa I highly recommend it. If you run it fresh I think it would be a very fast course and the director is very friendly. Afterwards you can pick up a random trophy or plaque (none of these have anything to do with running, but I think that’s part of the fun). Last year Scott got a bowling trophy. I passed on additional junk to carry back on the plane.

This brings my total marathon count up to 72 and gave me state number 40. So hopefully next year I can complete the 50 States.

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Tags: Marathons, Race Reports //