Prospect Park, Brooklyn
18 November 2012
4:59:53 Finish
This race was HARD. lol I did not train on enough hills to do well on this course, but I survived and had a good time. The weather was perfect for a marathon–40s and partly cloudy. The race had about 500 runners, so it felt just right and definitely not over-crowded.
The course consisted of two lower loops of Prospect Park (about four miles total), then six loops of the entire park. If you have never run in Prospect Park before, the big loop is roughly half uphill and half downhill; there is very little flat.
The most loops I’ve ever done of the park is three (during the Cherry Tree 10-Miler each winter), but I managed to hold on pretty well through the fourth loop. My heart rate was pretty high after the fourth time up the hill, so I chilled out a little bit on the downhill, but it wasn’t enough. I hit the hill for the fifth time and just didn’t have it in me to run up it again. I walked the hill on the fifth and sixth loops. My overall pace dropped quite a bit from that and I squeaked in just seven seconds under the five-hour mark.
Overall I enjoyed the race quite a bit. It was like doing a long training run in the park, but with people cheering. There were some really great spectators the entire time I was running. Sometimes if you’re slow people drift away before you get done, but there were people cheering the entire time I was running.
Since I was walking already, I stopped to take a picture of these people with their pots and pans:
They also had this great sign, which was still true, even if I was walking up the hill:
This marathon was my first long race to wear my fabulous Altra Intuition 1.5s. I ran in the original Intuitions from March until October, then switched to the newer model just in time for my last long training run. I highly recommend them.
On the course:
Here is Mike’s DIY Team Norma hat:
NYCRuns puts on a good race and I’m glad I ran this one. In addition to the usual post-race Gatorade and bagels, each of us got a tiny cheesecake and the fancy medal.