Eugene Marathon - Race Report

As many of you know, I've been training for the Eugene Marathon since the beginning of the year. I have been trying a new training schedule that only has me running 3 days a week and cross training two days. I wasn't sure how that would work out when it came to race day. The good thing is that I was able to train injury free and I'm not burnt out on running, which has happened in the past.

We headed down to Eugene on Saturday morning. I have learned my lesson that I cannot tell Merrick what we are doing ahead of time. He came into our room at 5:45 am and started asking when we were going to see Poppa and Grammy. So we left for Eugene earlier than we had planned to. We headed to packet pickup which was pretty well organized and wandered through the exhibits. I have to admit, I stopped by the booth with the cookies twice, with the excuse that I was carb loading =) The weather on Saturday was pretty cruddy, raining and windy so I was pretty nervous about what the weather would be like for the race. Bec aka Grammy made a wonderful prerace dinner of lasagna, salad and bread, to be topped off with cake and ice cream for Merrick's birthday.

Travis and I got up early Sunday morning to head into the Eugene Hilton to catch the shuttle to the start. We arrived at 6:20 am thinking we would have plenty of time since the shuttles were running every 10 minutes. Well... when we got there we realized there was a LONG line! We didn't get on a shuttle until 6:45 am. When the race starts at 7 am, this can make you really nervous. We arrived with 5 minutes to spare and quickly separated ways to head to our pace groups. I don't know how I did it, but I was able to find Rebecca at the start, which was a life saver in many ways. Having forgotten my watch, I was nervous about how I was going to pace myself. I haven't had much luck with the pace leaders in the past and I didn't want run with one if I didn't have to. Rebecca and I quickly got into a groove and started ticking the miles off. We both agreed that it was nice to run a course that we didn't know so everything was new to us. Rebecca's husband Corey and her dad Dennis were there to cheer us on at several points during the race and Poppa, Grammy and Merrick were at mile 17 and 24. It was great to see familiar faces, especially late in the race.

The new training program worked! I ran a Personal Record (PR) of 4 hours 1 minute and 26 seconds. This is about 18 minutes faster than my previous PR. I'm feeling great and fully recovered, I'm thinking about lacing up the shoes for a run tomorrow and I'm even contemplating signing up for the Foot Traffic Marathon on July 4th weekend... I'll keep you posted if that happens.

I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to my amazing husband who has not only put up with my marathon training for 4 months, but on top of that my studying for the SPHR exam which is this Saturday. Thankfully we get to relax in Hawaii in about 10 days!