One day shy of the one year anniversary of my run at the Baltimore Running Festival, I found myself in the state of my birth running the Amica Newport Marathon. I’ve been looking forward to this since last December, Newport has been my primary focus for a fall marathon. My expectations have been tempered of late as I’m not done dealing with my birthday ankle sprain, and to boot I’m not quite over this dumb cold.
I drove down to Newport arriving at 5pm the Saturday before the race. The expo was at the Newport Yachting Center, which really just meant it was in a big tent in the parking lot outside. It was surprisingly cold here! The weather channel said race day would be 60+ but the afternoon before feels more like 40. I am underdressed.
Race day! I got up at 4:30am, hyper hydrated per usual, breakfast of two bagel halves + extra crunchy Jif. I brought iced coffee with me – maybe a bit too much as my anxiety was running high. I could hear the wind roaring outside and for whatever reason really managed to psych myself out about the conditions. Inside the house I was staying at it was quite cold, and it wasn’t until I went out to the car at 6:30am that I realized the wind itself wasn’t as bitter as I thought it would be.
In addition to my cough & congestion problems I’ve been feeling fairly nauseous lately, pretty much ever since the finish of the BAA Half (I wasted the entire Columbus Day holiday sick in bed). Some of this morning’s sickness may have been normal nerves but overall it was worse than usual, I seriously felt like barfing, before/during/after. The series of texts I sent Christine before she was even up was particularly pitiful but fortunately she was able to snap me out of it somewhat with breathing exercises.
I headed down to the start, arriving at 7am. There was a schoolbus shuttle to the start from the parking lot at Second Beach – I stood in line for the bus for about 60 seconds before I made the executive decision that today would be a two-shirt + long sleeve kind of day.
Bus to the start. Part of the reason I have been so excited about this race is it started right on the spit of land where I stayed for Nate & Lucy’s wedding a few years ago. In fact, the start line is exactly where I sprained my ankle the day morning of the wedding, stepping off a curb and almost into a oncoming car. This pavement, it has long been reasoned, owed me.
So. The race. I was late to the chute and couldn’t figure out how to get in – there were no gaps anywhere on the side I was on. Eventually I limbo’d through the fence somewhere behind the 9:00 split sign. The start was delayed for 10-15 minutes for reasons unexplained – I never heard an anthem, an announcement or even a go. This is a sign of poor organization. But eventually, we went.
The course starts up a small hill into Newport proper. At mile two we were just south of downtown Newport, mile four a small loop through the parking lot of Fort Adams State Park (I had never been there before). Mile 6 was a bit more interesting – this passed by Castle Hill, the area I explored earlier this summer during a wedding I was filming.
Miles 6 to 7.5 was to my mind the most difficult stretch of road I can recall running. The course here was along Ocean Ave, wrapping around the southwestern-most bit of Aquidneck Island. The wind off the ocean was absolutely brutal. I know this area is breathtakingly beautiful – when I was here in July I hung out on these rocks for hours. Today, it was miserable, only way to run was with head down. I thought I was going to lose my glasses, and kept a hand to my number lest that tear off.
Miles 8 through 10 were more sheltered, winding through some cool ponds and houses. At 10 the course turned north on Bellevue, alongside the mansions of Newport. 
We passed Breakers at 11, and the crowd began to build here. This was one of the more exciting parts of the race, the buildup to the finish of the first half. People around me were picking up their pace and people were screaming that we were almost finished – I actually would have been happy to have been done at this point. I think in general I prefer if there’s a split earlier in the race where the half & full diverge so we don’t have to get all excited about a false ending. Anyway, we turned east past the entrance to the Cliff Walk and the halfers finished roughly where we started.
Mile 15 was the next notable point for me – coming into this downhill I started looking for my people and eventually found them at 15 3/4ths along Second Beach. I tried to high-five Ebs but missed again – this bothered me because the same thing happened at Quincy earlier this year and I learned later he was upset.
The 16-17 stretch was pretty miserable. This out & back was so windy, similar to 6-7.5, but now with the bonus of blowing sand. Steven told me later that sand gets airborne at 25mph wind – if so the gusts were well above this. Sandblast to the face – I was picking it out of my ears nose and mouth for the next 24 hours. Some guys on the leeward side of the dune were parasailing – this is a smarter choice for an entertainment option than running on a day like today.
At mile 17.5 I saw my peeps again – Steven on the right and Christine & Tate on the left (Eben hiding from the wind in the car). I wasn’t too familiar with the course (I hadn’t looked at the map in some months) so didn’t realize until here that pretty much the rest of the course was one long out & back along the eastern coast. Rolling hills here, fairly reasonably sized but not horrible. More depressing was just how long this backtrack was. I was feeling fairly sick by this point. I saw Nate & Lucy at 20 & again at 22 – those two miles felt like they were 40 minutes apart. I was ignoring my GPS completely by this point but in retrospect it looks like I was above 10:00 splits when I saw them both times. Soon after mile 22 I let myself walk for two minutes, something I’m loathe to do. The urge to vomit was strong, in retrospect I should have done it and gotten it over with.
At mile 24 I saw Team HB again – they had recruited some random old people to scream & shout for me which my brain wasn’t really able to process. Why are these strangers so excited to see me?! I finally got my high five with Ebs, and turned for home. I made it past 25 and the wheels really started to come off. As you can see from the red in the heat map I ended up walking half of the last mile – the entire uphill bit, trying to get my nausea under control. I was vaguely aware that I was giving up what would have been my third sub-4hr marathon but it was the decision I choose to make. Or had to make? I’m not sure. Eventually I picked up to a trot for a looping finish back by the starting beach.
This marathon was my 9th overall and 8th in the past year. It wasn’t my strongest, wasn’t my fastest, wasn’t the prettiest. But it was important to me nonetheless, 
both in terms of overcoming my adversity-de-jour (wind/sickness/ankle) and in that my people came to cheer for me. And finally doing one in Rhode Island was personally very satisfying. My final time was 4:04:17, 11 minutes faster than Maine, 40 seconds faster than Vermont but well slower than New Orleans and 30 minutes off my PR in Traverse City in May.
After a slightly longer than normal requisite recovery time at the finish, my crew & I packed up & headed over to a Wendy’s for some empty celebratory calories. I felt so lucky that we ended up at this random fast food place that happened to have a large flatscreen TV turned to CNN so that we could watch Felix Baumgartner’s record setting leap into the stratosphere. Utterly amazing. I’m so glad we didn’t miss this.
So that’s Newport. My next marathon is in Philadelphia, five weeks from today.
