Mission accomplished

There I was, standing in the starting corral with 4 other dudes tethered to my waist with a few feet of rope.  In a couple minutes we'd be off for a running tour of the Virginia Beach oceanfront complete with an excursion through Fort Story and stroll down the boardwalk.  I posted a while back about this Guinness World Record attempt.  We planned to run under 3hrs but unfortunately had a couple of injuries on the team and had to make some late substitutions but we were still in great shape for beating the current record (3:26).  We figured on being right around 3:03-3:05 so we set out to run 7:00 pace and nailed it up through mile 16.  I was feeling great and everyone else seemed to be holding steady.  Mile 16-18 is when a marathon starts to get serious and if you are running at your limit things get tough.

You might be able to tell who is on cruise control and who is working hard at this point.

We needed to back off our pace to 7:20-7:30 for the last 8 miles to keep the team on track but there was never any risk of missing the record.  The last mile was all about guts and I'm proud of everyone for hanging tough and kicking the pace back up for a 6:57 coming down the boardwalk to the finish.  Our official time was 3:06:04, crushing the previous record.

This wasn't my fastest marathon and it wasn't the fastest I could have run on this day - I figure I was good for a 2:48-2:50 - but it was tons of fun.  For the first 15 miles we had a pack of clingers just sitting on our heels.  Maybe they liked our 7:00/mile pace or maybe they just wanted to hang with the cool kids.  All the spectators gave us great support and it was a really nice day to run a marathon.  Maybe next year we'll come back and knock out that sub-3hr unfinished business.