For those of you who have followed my posts on running over the last year, you\u2019ll know that I ran my first Marathon in November. You\u2019ll also recall that it was a disaster \u2013 the temperature was 79F when I crossed the finish line (nearly five hours after I started), causing the closet thing I\u2019ve 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\u2019t beat the heat. So yesterday was my chance to redeem myself: the day of the Austin Marathon.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the second half of a Marathon. More experienced runners advised me to pick a flatter course to make my \u201ccomeback\u201d easier. But it was just too hard to pass up a Marathon in my backyard. Redemption or Downfall \u2013 it was going to be one or the other.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 heck, I even sprinted the last tenth of a mile. It was a success.<\/p>\n
I also hoped that I might be able to make it into the \u201cfast half\u201d of the men, with a time less than the median finish time. And since I\u2019m 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 \u2013 49 group was the fastest age group in the race. Go figure. It\u2019s median finish time was 4:08:48, with a mean of 4:17:37. The next fastest group was 40 \u2013 44, followed by 30 \u2013 34, then 35 \u2013 39, then 25 \u2013 29 and 20 \u2013 24. So much for the race belonging to the young. Interestingly, though, age 50 seems to be the point of decline. The 50 \u2013 54 age group median was slower than 45 \u2013 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\u2019ll have a narrow window of being one of the fast guys my age before I start to crumble and fall apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For those of you who have followed my posts on running over the last year, you\u2019ll know that I ran my first Marathon in November. You\u2019ll also recall that it was a disaster \u2013 the temperature was 79F when I crossed the finish line (nearly five hours after I started), causing the closet thing I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}