First marathon, check. Next day hobbled, check. Worth it, check.

I was too tired yes­ter­day after­noon to post about my first marathon suc­cess. I should start with the good news that I fin­ished, with­out stop­ping or walk­ing at all, with a time of 4h27m  for 42.195km/26.2miles. I’m really proud of the fact that I fin­ished with­out walk­ing at all, even though I was slower than I wanted to be. How­ever, that really doesn’t mat­ter. I am very, very sat­is­fied to have fin­ished my first marathon. It feels like a big accomplishment.

The main issue was that around kilo­me­ter 9 my usual knee pain started. My right knee appar­ently has some ten­don issues. I was hop­ing that the week off while I was sick had given it enough rest, but appar­ently not. It didn’t let up, but I decided to just keep going. I prob­a­bly need to think about chang­ing my stride, and get­ting bet­ter shoes, or I should just con­tinue with my plan of not becom­ing a pro­fes­sional marathon runner.

When I fin­ished and finally stopped, the feel­ing in my legs was one of the strangest sen­sa­tions that I have every expe­ri­enced. It is hard to describe, but I was glad that I hadn’t stopped dur­ing the race, because I think it would have been as I feared — very dif­fi­cult to start again. At least that fear is par­tially what kept me going.

My knee pain was fairly bad, and then it spread to other parts of my legs, mainly the mus­cles and/or lig­a­ments at my hip creases. I’m sure this is because I altered my stride to com­pen­sate for my knee, and I had a very short stride for most of the race. Today, my right knee is fairly swollen, although it doesn’t show up very well when I tried to take a pic­ture of my own knees this morn­ing. Also, I tend to view the injury, sore­ness, and limp­ing as a badge of honor that shows that I did some­thing spe­cial. That is part of my exer­cise sick­ness. If I’m not bruised and sore from some phys­i­cal activ­ity, mostly climb­ing or run­ning, then I haven’t been work­ing hard enough. At the same time, I do have in the worry in the back of my mind that I hope I didn’t do any real dam­age and that this is just some swelling from hav­ing done some­thing a bit extreme by run­ning a marathon. I guess I will find out in the next few days, hope­fully. Clearly, I won’t be run­ning for a while, which is fine, and I will have to take a shorter break from climb­ing until the pain is gone.

Also, it was a week­end for a lot of marathon suc­cesses. All my friends that were run­ning this week­end fin­ished their races. Sarah fin­ished her 40km part of the 80km ultra­ma­rathon that she and a friend ran on Sat­ur­day. I want to catch up with her (haha, no pun intended, although that would prob­a­bly be a pretty funny race) today to see how she is doing and how fun­nily she is walk­ing. It was her first marathon as well. Sol and Mike also fin­ished the same marathon that I ran on Sun­day. You can read Mike’s account of the race here. Mike was able to bike to work today, so he seems to be not to worse for wear.