My main focus this spring is training for the Comrades Marathon, a race with a storied history that began before anyone had settled on the distance for a "Marathon." The Comrades course distance, at 89+ kilometers, didn't prove popular enough to become a standard, but the name stuck. I'm registered for the 2023 edition on June 11, and I started my training regimen for it last December.
When you are training for a race this long (this year's edition should be close to 56 miles), a run-of-the-mill 26.2-mile marathon is a training run. So when my friend Chas invited me to join him at the race, I figured it would make a good mid-cycle training run, and hopped on board. I've done the Ellerbe Half Marathon but never the full, so it would make a nice notch on the belt as well.
Comrades requires a marathon or longer as a qualifier. This time is also used to set your starting corral for the race. I had already qualified at New York, but my time of 4:34:50 put me in corral 7 out of 8, and with over 15,000 runners in the race, it would take a long time for me to even cross the start line. With a hard 12-hour cutoff based on the race start gun, I would need every advantage I could get to be awarded a coveted finishers medal. So I set my "A" goal at Ellerbe to be sub-4 hours, which would move me up to Corral 4. The "B" goal was sub-4:15, which would still place me in Corral 5, and that would be a heck of a lot better than Corral 7!
I haven't been specifically training for a marathon, Ellerbe is very hilly, and I didn't taper for this race, so I really had no idea of what I was capable of, but 4 hours seemed possible -- that works out to a 9:09 pace per mile, and most of my training has been at that pace or faster. My longest run, however, was a 19-miler at a 9:23 pace, both shorter and slower than if I had been doing focused training for a 4-hour marathon.
Ellerbe is a small, friendly race in a small, friendly town in central North Carolina. There were about 70 runners each in the marathon and the half marathon, which started an hour later. The course has lots of hills, and the marathoners must run it twice. It's a "lollipop" course with a 2.5-mile "stick" you run at the start and the end, and an 8-mile "candy" loop in the middle. The stick part is nice because you end up seeing both marathoners and half-marathoners coming and going. The loop is where most of the hills are.
 |
| The course |
The race starts in the middle of the road out of town. You run behind a police car for the first couple miles, and then you're own your own in the countryside. My plan was to run comfortably around a 9-minute pace on the flats, pick it up a bit on the downs, and put in an equal effort on the climbs. The first several miles trend downward, so I was around an 8:40 pace and felt very comfortable. Peter Asciutto (of "Idiot Run" fame) was out of the course and got this photo of me and another runner a couple miles from the start:
After a while I chatted a bit with the runner in blue, and he was also shooting for a sub-4. But when the serious hills started a couple miles later, he pulled ahead of me as I didn't want to overdo it on the climbs.
I noted that the really big hill finished up around Mile 7, which would be Mile 20 on the second loop of the course. If I could stay on pace through that point, I would have a shot at my sub-4 race.
Throughout the race, there were friendly volunteers. Though the course wasn't closed, there was very little traffic, and what cars we did see were extremely courteous. The whole town seems to come together for this event.
 |
| Another Peter Asciutto photo -- I think around Mile 11 |
The course flattens out near the end of the loop, with just a couple gradual uphills heading into town. But at this point I started to notice that my watch wasn't quite agreeing with the mileage markings painted on the road. My watch ticked off the miles a few hundred yards before each marker, and the difference seemed to increase with each mile. Despite this, I made it to the turnaround at 1:58 -- two minutes to spare on my quest for sub-4.
This time around, however, the 8:40 paces didn't come quite so easily on the flats, and my uphills were in the 9:30s and 9:40s. I did some figuring in my head around Mile 18, and it looked like I'd need to average about a 9:20 pace for the rest of the race to finish under 4 hours. I made it up the big hill before Mile 20, but even after this point, the course was hillier than I remembered. I was keeping my pace in that range or faster when I was running, but I needed to stop for water at the aid stations, and that slowed me down quite a bit. I ran Miles 21-23 at 9:35, 9:20, and 9:32 pace. And my watch was getting farther and farther behind the mile markers.
When my watch clicked through at 24 miles, my elapsed time was 3:37. If my watch had been accurate, I would have had almost 23 minutes to run the last 2.2 miles -- a comfortable 10:18 pace. By the time I got to the actual 24-mile mark, I only had 18 minutes left. This would have necessitated an 8:11 pace, and I was in no condition to run that fast. Realizing that sub-4 was impossible, I let myself slow down. I ran Mile 25 in 9:58 and 26 in 11:26. I crossed the line at 4:05:28, with my watch reading 26.63 miles. It doesn't seem like much, but that extra 0.4 miles meant there was no chance of me reaching my goal.
Chas (who had finished first overall with an impressive 3:10:13) took a photo after I crossed the line that pretty much sums up how I felt at the time:
 |
| Happy to be done, but also kind of annoyed |
But now, thinking back on the race, there really isn't anything I would do differently. I'm not training for this race, I'm training for Comrades. This is my fitness level right now, and it's where I need to be. I was able to run 6 miles the day after the race (something I would never even attempt if this was a normal marathon) as required by my training plan. I'll continue to put in more miles, and there will be weekends down the line where I run 38, 40 miles — much more than this weekend's 32. If all goes well, I should be able to finish Comrades in June, and go farther than I've ever gone in a day before. If I finish it (or if I don't), I'll write about it here... and then move on to the next challenge! Stay tuned!
