That was awful!



The Jacksonville Marathon, "voted the fastest marathon in the south", is typically held in December... which means it has potential for highly variable weather. I don't recall the race ever filling up, so this is a nice local race to register for at the last minute if the weather looks favorable. This plan needs accurate weather forecast to be effective, and registering as late as Wednesday before the race. I knew this. But when I looked at the weather forecast on Monday it looked like 55 degrees for race time. I haven't raced a marathon in a long time and got excited and decided to go ahead and register for the race. By Wednesday the forecast had changed to be much warmer with potential for rain. And by Saturday we had a classic warm and humid Florida morning. If I had followed my plan I would not have signed up!




But while warm, I am not blaming the weather for this day's outcome.

This is how I expected to feel for the whole race based on my fitness and confidence level:



My hip flexors started hurting about mile 10. Uh oh. That isn't good. This was pretty frustrating given my fitness level. Over the next 10 miles things just kept getting worse and worse as the legs gradually failed me.

In the next race photo I was still running, but barely.



When I tried to walk they hurt even worse! At about mile 22, I was resigned to walk it in and forced myself to get thru the "pain transition" so my legs would settle into walking mode.

I finished, but I walked about 4 miles. I didn't even try to run the last little bit on the track in the stadium.



So what the heck happened? I was good on nutrition and my fitness was there. I even stayed in a hotel in Jacksonville the night before to eliminate the early morning drive. I think I just wasn't fully recovered from the 25 mile training run I had done less than 2 weeks prior to the race. That training run had felt great! Some life events had caused that run to get delayed and fall closer to race day than was wise.

This was the 40th year of the Jacksonville Marathon. The idea of a long sleeve race shirt was nice, but in this case it was a little disappointing to get a low quality tech shirt with a crappy neck collar.



The Ameris Bank Jacksonville Marathon was held on December 10, 2023.

Results: https://my.raceresult.com/271620/results

Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/10359670025

The training run that did me in: https://www.strava.com/activities/10306307045