An Inspirational Journey
Needing to add some distance to train for the upcoming ultras, I reached out to the people in charge of the Pensacola Marathon to see if they needed any pacers and ended up pacing the 5 hour group. This gives me free entry to run the marathon while letting me train for the longer distance marathons coming up.
While pacing this specific race, I made a few mistakes (had to make a quick stop to bathroom, auto-pause on watch wasn’t disabled, and not using strong tape for my timed splits wristband). I ended up paying for the mistakes and learning from them. First, I didn’t go to the bathroom before race, which I ended up really needing to go and tried to hold it as long as I could. I waited until there weren’t anyone behind me close by just in case they were following my pace. Second, I forgot to turn off “auto pause” on my watch so when I made the quick bathroom stop, my watch stopped automatically and started throwing off the steady pace time. Third, I used cheap tape for my wristband (which included all the split times for each miles) so I didn’t realize it but it had fallen off somewhere. I suspect it came off while constantly trying to hold the pace time sign together, which wasn’t put together strong and actually had some strong wind gusts that detached the sign from the stick.
Although I finished the official finishing time was 4:59:08 (and my watch showing 4:58:18), I ended up crossing the finish line with a gun time right about 5:00 hours (see race photo below).
Photo provided by ChessiePhoto.
