I just finished my first ever marathon: the BMO Marathon in Vancouver!! There’s just so much going through my head that I figured I’d do another thoughtdump.
The weather was beautiful if you were out and about and wanted to enjoy the day, but it was on the warmer side for a long run. It wasn’t ideal running conditions in my books, but it wasn’t anything new: my brother and I have run in similar weather when we were training. I carried a water bottle with me, strapped on with a waist band, which also held 8 energy gels that I was going to use throughout the run. The start was pretty nice: the sun wasn’t beating down too hard yet. It was a gentle uphill along Cambie Street, and then down W 49th towards UBC. Near the 7-8km mark, I started to feel the incline a bit. Thankfully, most of the steep hill was gone by 11-12km.
As we rounded through UBC, I managed to spot this hilarious speed monitor on top of a speed limit sign. We were definitely going under the speed limit (thank goodness!) so no problems there! 🙂
There were an abundance of water stations along the route, with plenty of awesome volunteers filling up cups and keeping the area clean from everyone tossing their used cups.
I did take a photo of the halfway point, which was close to Spanish Banks beach. At 21.1k, my breathing and legs were still doing fine. As we crossed the Burrard Street bridge at the 30km mark, I saw my mom and my brother’s fiancee, who were here to cheer all of us on. I tossed my waistband with my water bottle to them and continued onto the final 12km of sea wall. I started entering the unchartered territory for myself: I had wanted to do a 35k run prior but ran out of weeks and only managed to do a 31k run. Up until 35-36k felt fine but after that, I hit “the wall”: my heartrate was on the higher side of 160s and my legs didn’t want to move.
Even as I slowed to a walk and regained my more comfortable heart rate of 140 BPMs at the 37k mark, my legs refused to move any faster. The final 5k were excruciatingly long: I turned one part of the sea wall, and it was another long stretch of pavement to the next turn. That last 5k took almost a full hour! In the end, I finished it in just under 5 hours 30 minutes. For me, finishing was all that mattered, and so I checked off that box no problem. I’m super thankful to my friends, who showed up to cheer me on at the end. The adrenaline rush at the end helped give an extra push I needed to cross that finish line. We ended up going out for lunch afterwards, really blessed to have amazing friends!
In retrospect, I think I started late on getting into the routine of Marathon training when the new year started. For a target of just finishing, it probably didn’t matter too much. I did have a two week setback in March when I got sick and had to take time off running to recover. That being said, my other friend Anduleh came into this with no training at all and he also managed to finish, but I think he’s generally more active than I am so maybe there’s that. I did manage to catch up to him by the seawall, and we did take a photo together so that was pretty cool.
Would I do the marathon again? Absolutely: I think life would be boring if we didn’t attempt to do hard things, and running a marathon is definitely a challenge for the majority of people. Since my target this year was to just to complete the marathon, I think with more adequate training, I can pull off a sub-5 hour time next year! With a tangible, quantitative goal in mind, I can put my head down and discipline myself to do everything I can to reach said goal. For the next little while, that will mean keeping a consistent running routine that involves 20k runs on the weekends, which I plan to resume once I let my legs recover from this marathon in which I ran 10+ kilometres longer than my previous longest run ever.
Anyways, that’s enough rambling from me this time around. Until whatever life brings me next,
~Lui
