For those of you who have followed my posts on running over the last year, you’ll know that I ran my first Marathon in November. You’ll also recall that it was a disaster – the temperature was 79F when I crossed the finish line (nearly five hours after I started), causing the closet thing I’ve come to a near-death experience. It was a very disappointing race because I know I could have done better (I walked most of the last six miles), but I just couldn’t beat the heat. So yesterday was my chance to redeem myself: the day of the Austin Marathon.

The Austin Marathon was definitely risky for me. The first half is difficult because it is full of hills. The second half is difficult because, well, it’s the second half of a Marathon. More experienced runners advised me to pick a flatter course to make my “comeback” easier. But it was just too hard to pass up a Marathon in my backyard. Redemption or Downfall – it was going to be one or the other.

And it was redemptive. My goal was to come out at a set pace (around 10 minutes/mile) and keep that pace for the whole race, finishing strong (in other words, the exact opposite of my first Marathon experience). And I accomplished that goal: I ran the first half at a pace of 9:40/mile and the second half at a pace of 9:50/mile. I finished in 4:18:30, better than my stretch goal of 4:20. But more importantly, I felt good crossing the finish line – heck, I even sprinted the last tenth of a mile. It was a success.

I also hoped that I might be able to make it into the “fast half” of the men, with a time less than the median finish time. And since I’m teaching an intro to statistics course at UT this semester, I dove into the statistics of the results when they were posted last night. Alas, I beat the mean, but not the median. The average finish time for men was 4:23:23, and the median finish time was 4:17:25. I was in the slow half, but just barely. I thought that maybe I would be in the fast half of my age group, but amazingly the M45 – 49 group was the fastest age group in the race. Go figure. It’s median finish time was 4:08:48, with a mean of 4:17:37. The next fastest group was 40 – 44, followed by 30 – 34, then 35 – 39, then 25 – 29 and 20 – 24. So much for the race belonging to the young. Interestingly, though, age 50 seems to be the point of decline. The 50 – 54 age group median was slower than 45 – 49 by 23 minutes. Since I turn 50 in less than 3 months, maybe my best running days are soon to be over. Or maybe I’ll have a narrow window of being one of the fast guys my age before I start to crumble and fall apart.