La Paz Marathon, The Race
(Note: I have no idea how this post ended up here. It belongs with its prequel, in March of 2013. Curse you, Blogger.)
One thing I’ve learned is that you never want to get up too early on the day of the marathon, since you really don’t want to give your nerves any extra jitters. Liebi and I get up at around 5, we start our drive to the Plaza Espana at 6, arrive at 6:30, and finally start at 7.
One thing I’ve learned is that you never want to get up too early on the day of the marathon, since you really don’t want to give your nerves any extra jitters. Liebi and I get up at around 5, we start our drive to the Plaza Espana at 6, arrive at 6:30, and finally start at 7.
3,000 runners have assembled for the inaugural La Paz Marathon—not bad at all. Liebi and I run the first kilometer together through the city before we finally get lost in the crowd. We won't meet again until 4 p.m. at home many hours later. Through the downtown area we go, the streets are sealed off for this special event, luckily. Once we reach the autopista, I still felt good. You always need to remember that it is your run, that you run at your pace and nobody else’s, and in the end let the chips fall where they may.
We start climbing the dreaded hill, but I’ve already done this, so there’s no concern here. I pass on the first water stop at 5 km. There will be another at 10, and I will forego this one as well. I’m happy to say that the run goes quite well up the mountain and equally so down the other side.
I am cruising through Miraflores, the crowd applauding us when I feel a twang around km 30 around my groin. Not good. It’s the feeling you get when a rubber band settles itself after you’ve extended it too much. Shake it off, I’m thinking, except that there’s another twang a minute later that effectively incapacitates my right leg. No. No. And no again. With 12 km to go, my run is pretty much ruined. I have taken about three hours to get to 30 km, a great time considering the run. Now I will be lucky to finish at all.
I know how people always dread the wall in a marathon. That’s when they, quite literally, hit a wall, things seem to cramp up and your feet are running as if they had been covered with concrete shoes. I honestly have never had a problem with that, except that an injury is now my wall.
I half walk, half jog the last 12 km’s, thoroughly disgusted at my bad luck. So I guess the number 1492 is cursed, after all. I don’t care, really. I can barely move and am lucky to run the last km without further injuring myself. I finish around 5 hours, my worst time ever at a marathon, but somebody still slips me the La Paz Marathon medal around my neck, I pound tons of Powerade, and then get on with my life, trying to get home.
Liebi, I learn, gets there around an hour later—it seems I wasn’t the only person struggling. There were people collapsing at the finish line at a rate I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Par for the course when you’re running at over two miles altitude.
As I’m writing this, I’m still limping and taking anti-inflammatories. More than anything, I’m just disappointed at how the run went, being that I had prepared for so long. I had expected a time between four and four and a half hours, and that clearly didn’t happen.
Then again, I also realize that I’ll need to shake off the injury bug and get ready for the next run, whenever and wherever that is going to be.
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