Boston Marathon -- 3:09:44

The weather was essentially perfect for the 2008 Boston Marathon, my 2nd Boston Marathon and my 7th marathon (or longer) race.

I've been having a knee tightness problem on and off since sometime late last year. It bothered me a lot last December in Hawaii, after the California International Marathon. So, I had missed about 1/3rd of my training runs at least. I had one week of 54 miles and I think 4 training runs this year of 18 miles or longer. That's just not enough to maintain my fitness.

3 hours 9 minutes 44 seconds was my finishing time. Yeah, I'm disappointed with that. In the grand scheme of things, I know that's still a relatively fast time and that I am qualified for next year's Boston.

I really should have stuck to a 3:05 goal at the beginning but instead I was on a 3 hour pace. Given how many training runs I've missed, that was a mistake. I started fading around mile 20 and got a bad cramp in my left hamstring and right hip that I never quite recovered from, so I felt like I was shuffling along for those last 6 miles. It was difficult and dozens and dozens of runners passed me.

On the positive side, my knee didn't bother me. I felt it from about mile 2 to 9, but then that feeling of tightness and soreness went away and never came back. It was never uncomfortable even when I did feel it.

My Garmin GPS watch gave me some trouble during the race. I didn't realize how close it was to being full of data. (There's no indicator.) Around mile 2 it started warning me that it was going to get filled and then the display was nearly completely filled up with a warning for the rest of the race, making it unusable. It also started beeping at me every 10 or 15 seconds which was extremely annoying. I also forgot to turn off the auto lap timer, so that was user error.

I loved watching the women's Olympic Trials on Sunday.

It was wonderful having my parents there. It felt like it took me a day to recover from my overnight flight on Friday night and then I didn't feel like doing anything after race. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for being there, and to Jennifer for watching Claire.

For breakfast, I had a bread roll, banana, and Cliff Bar. I weighed 167.2 lbs on the Friday morning.