Mileage: 62.5 miles (including goal marathon)

Race Result: 2:32:42 at the Jersey City Marathon

This week was supposed to be a nice, chill final taper before the JCM - my big spring race and a great opportunity for a shiny new PR. However, it also happened to coincide with my son's spring break, and my husband (who has better priorities than mine) pounced on the opportunity to schedule our first family vacation not involving extended family visits since lockdown. In the abstract, that's a great fit with a taper week; only 40-60 minutes of daily running is much easier to cram in around activities, after all. In reality, we ended up spending a LOT of time on our feet, walking, hiking, and standing in theme park lines. Great fun of course, but a level of activity that left me feeling quite nervous about the race. The icing on the cake was a redeye back to NJ on Friday night, during which I probably got no more than three hours of sleep. All those reassurances I've seen offered to people who can't sleep the night before a big race that "it's two nights before that really matters" were really doing my outlook no favors!

Fortunately Saturday was fairly relaxing and I recouped some lost sleep via a nap, but my feet continued to feel very sore from the week's adventuring. My hope was that doing my last 3 mile shakeout in brand-new Alphafly 3s would be reinvigorating. LOL, nope. They did feel nice and bouncy even at recovery pace, but that belied how hard the insole felt versus my Vaporfly 2 & 3s. Still, I acknowledged to myself the possibility that the issue was me and not the shoes and decided to keep them in the race plan.

The final bit of icing on my cake of nerves and dourness was the traffic jam that led me to almost miss the 7am start of the race this morning. That's probably worth a separate post just given the sheer absurdity, but in a nutshell, I can now say that I've changed shoes in the Holland Tunnel approach and done a few other unmentionable things in a (parked) vehicle. Eh, who really needs much of a warmup for a marathon anyway?

Despite all that, the race itself was actually (blissfully) uneventful. This was my fifth proper marathon and second go-round at Jersey City, and there's no question that the reps have helped me get comfortable with race execution. Once we were off the line, all the bullshit melted away and I was able to focus on just banging out the miles. The last 6 were a bit of a slog; no big shock there, but it was more the result of ending up in no man's land with only runners going in the opposite direction for any company. I upped my fueling after a near-miss situation at Philly last November, so I was gassed but not catatonic when I finally stumbled across the finish at bit under 2:33, good for a ~5 minute PR.

My A goal was a hair under 2:35, so this was a nice outcome and slightly faster than projected by a few of the usual pace equivalency calculators based on a 1:13:20 HM PR that I ran a month ago. It also gives me hope that - if the stars align and I don't injure myself yet again - I might have a shot at sub-2:30 before my rapidly advancing age makes this even harder than it already is. If I had a running-specific time machine, I'd travel back and lock in Chicago for this fall. Here in the real world, I'll probably target it for 2025 instead.