Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Final marathon thing, I promise



I just wanted to share a few more tidbits from the marathon experience.

First, no, I didn't actually wear the medal to work. I did hang it, along with the shirt I wore (washed - Mrs Notthat was horrified that I intended to hang it as it was when I took it off; if Timmy Lincecum throws you his jersey after a game, you don't wash it, do you?) in my office window.

I am extremely fortunate that they are very loose with their workplace standards here.

Next, the race results have been posted and, all I got to say is, I wasn't last in my age group.

One odd thing was that I finished in exactly 6:30:00. The funny thing is that, as a goof, and after giving a few high fives and hand shakes while going along towards the finish line, I hesitated stepping on the timing pad at the very end. Like I was trying to intentionally get this nice round number.

This is a screen shot of my results - yes, you can go on the web and see my name associated with a genuine athletic event! Ain't America a great place or what!

I ended up in 741st* place (out of 769 finishers), 522nd among males and 58th in my age group (there were 59 of us between 50 and 54). The number in blue is my age-graded time. (For the record, there were a lot of people older than me that had better times. Some MUCH better.) My average pace was 14:52 per mile - my very optimistic goal was 15:00 per mile, so beating that was a big surprise.

And that's about it. Everybody has said such nice things (well, except Blogmaid, but then, well, she's Blogmaid) and a surprising number of people have more or less willingly stood there while I described the tension and strain and pain and iPod locating issues to them, with the stories getting just a bit more colorful each time.

And here's a surprise, even to me - I thought it would take at least a month for me to forget the negative parts of this ordeal and think that doing it again might be a good idea. I think I'm already at that point. This is kind of addictive. Outside of the tiny blister on my foot (and a HUGE thanks to Mrs Notthat for helping it mend), I'm pretty much recovered and ready to go again.

That's it - move along...

*Actually, a later version of the results has me at 742nd place. I've got the screen shot at 741st though, so that's the story I'm sticking to.

3 comments:

DAK said...

And you finished in front of M60-64 (but behind F45-49). Sorry to hear about the blister, and many kind words to Ms. That for helping fix it. They can really be painful.

mary ann said...

Oh, very lovely display there in your office window. I applaud Mrs. That for washing the shirt and for helping with your blister wound. Congrats again and when's the next time?

notthatlucas said...

Two interesting things:
About 50 feet before crossing the finish line, they announced my name and that I was from Redwood City. This was very cool, and if I had known that they were going to do that, I'd have tried to video record it.

I just got an email today from a company called Brightroom offering to sell me two pictures they took of me during the race. They tied my bib number with my registration email address - this was kind of cool. They want $52 for the two jpg files though - not quite so cool.