The race was so cold, at 6am the wind chill factor was at 16oF and the actual temperature was 27oF. The water at the water stops made ice spots on the ground and my gloves froze when I got water on them. I wore tights, a head band, gloves, and a jacket the whole race and wore some throw away clothes to the start and ditched a long sleeve shirt around mile 3. My face was very cold and not too many people were talking because it was hard to. The 3:40 pace group started out slow, so I split off from them after the first mile and held my pace when I got down to a 8:20/mi. The group caught up at mile 8, they must have picked it up quite a bit, they said that they ran mile 7 in 7:45. I ran with the group until I hit Magic Kingdom around mile 10 and slowly started to pull forward because of the crowding. I kept the same pace until I hit mile 14 and my knee started bothering me which slowed me down a little in the middle miles, but not much. As soon as I hit mile 20 the adrenaline kicked in and I just started going faster. I averaged 8:15/mi in the last 10k. After the race it hurt to walk and I was so cold. I had a sweatshirt and pants to change into, but it didn't help much, I was still shivering waiting for my friend to finish. I was very happy to qualify for Boston, but at the time I could only think about getting warm. I was 22/782 in my age group which puts me at around the 97th percentile and 122/8152 for women which is around the 98.5 percentile and over all around the 95th percentile. So, very happy with how I did and happier to not have to run another marathon in 6 weeks. I'm going to do the 1/2 at the breast cancer marathon and try to get another PR for this running season.
My splits are 42:25 at 5mi (8:29/mi), 1:22:57 at 10mi (8:06/mi for mi 5-10), 1:48:37 at the half (8:17/mi), 2:46:30 at 20mi (8:19), and 3:37:40 overall. My overall pace was 8:18/mi. | 