Marathon today. I ran!

Yes, that’s right. There was the annual city marathon today. It commemorates the founding of our city. Mérida, Yucatán, México was founded 465 years ago in 1542.

Now that that is out of the way, I have to admit that I ran just the 5K race and not the marathon. I am not marathon ready yet. Though people think that because I run several times a week and that other people run marathons, that must mean that I can run a marathon. These are obviously not runners and they have no clue that marathon training is something that takes many more miles a week than what I am currently putting in.

Besides the fact that I am not ready for the distance, I am not able to participate in a Sunday marathon. Why do all the races around here have to be on a Sunday? The runners took off at 6:00 this morning. I needed to be in church by 10:30. That does not take into account the 30 minutes I need to pick people up on the way to church. Nor the fact that I need recovery time after any running before I am ready to head out the door. I usually have to be done with a race by 9:00, or 9:30 at the latest, to be ready for church. That would mean that I need to run a 3 hour marathon. Not likely since my 2 half marathon finishes were in the 2:30 (hour:minute) range.

Instead, I ran a 5K race today. Actually, 5.2K. My time was not that great. I did not push myself too hard. Final time was 29:32 for a pace of 9:08 min/mile. Not a PR, but not a horrible run either.

I did get a medal in this one. The first 300 people across the finish line got one. They had fruit and drinks afterwards too. Because the race started so early, I was able to stick around for a few minutes. Normally a 5K starts at 8:00 am around here. Today we started at 6:45. I think that was to be able to have our race finished before the marathoners started arriving.

When I was driving home, I saw the first several runners from the marathon coming down the road. The first 2 places were African looking men. After that there were several Mexican men and a few Africans.

I arrived home and walked to the end of the block and cheered several people as they came by. They passed within 1/2 block from my house. It was cool to walk down and see them running. My house was about the 19th mile of the 26.2 mile event. I had to leave before seeing the mortals (3:30+ marathoners) come by.

I will post results of the race tomorrow if I can remember to buy a paper.

2 thoughts on “Marathon today. I ran!”

  1. Dang, I wanted to hear that you ran/walked the marathon distance… just because it was there. Not that you were train for it.

    5.2k isn’t bad though… you had some physical exercise and then some spiritual exercise, so that a pretty good day!

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