I came up to Portsmouth for the Eastern States 20, another Boston prep race. I haven’t done this particular race before, but in years past it’s been run from Kittery Maine down to Salisbury Mass. Since Memorial Bridge between the two is under repair, we ran a revised course that only hit NH & MA.
The race had a late start at 11am, but the weather was perfect, light breeze off the water. We wound around Portsmouth for a few miles before finding 1A along the coast. The coast itself is gorgeous in parts, rocky outcroppings. At one point someone next to me said there was a guy with a goat on a rock offshore, but I couldn’t say for sure if that was true or not. Let’s assume so for idiosyncrasy’s sake.
I felt strong through the first 13.1 but things started to go poorly after that. In the last few miles I find myself checking my watch far too frequently. I happen to glance down right as it hits 17.76 miles, which beyond being a nice historic number is in a curious coincidence the length of a Marine Corps Marathon qualifier event held just recently [actually, 17.75km -ed]. As I think that, I’m also aware that the Marine Corps Marathon itself has its registration next Tuesday but at this moment I’m starting to bonk and the absolute last thing I want is to register for anothe race.
The last two miles of this race were fairly difficult, coming across the Hampton Harbor Inlet and then across the state line into Massachusetts. I was actively looking for Team HB who was somewhere around the finish but I didn’t actually find them until a few minutes after I finished. There wasn’t much in the way of food at the end, just muscle milk samples (blurgh) but hondo gave me a handful of wheat thins which pretty much saved my life.
My final time was 2:41:14, an 8:04 pace. This is faster than my marathon PR pace (8:10 in Austin) but quite a bit slower than my best half (7:18 in Chicago). I was fairly sick at the finish – I don’t think I used the best pacing strategy here, going out too fast and fading fairly strongly at the end (last two miles were by far the worst, averaging 9:01 min/mile).
I didn’t run with headphones today, my longest ever run without. So no song of the week (I’ll spare you the unfortunate Meatloaf tune I had stuck in my head for the last 10 miles). A few more photos here.
