Lessons learned from a big, hot mess

All the stuff I got from the Boogie Marathon

Readers may have noticed that it has been two weeks since the Boogie Night marathon that I ran and there hasn't been nary a post from me. Normally I would have posted earlier, but as the title of this post implies, things did not go well. To be honest, it has taken me almost this long to process things in my mind and get myself back into the running groove (I actually started the draft of this in the middle of last week, so about 10 days). Now I'm trying to identify what positives I can from the experience along with any lessons learned.

Before getting into what I gleaned from this latest running adventure, let me go over how things panned out. First things first - the official time was 4 hours 50 minutes 50 seconds, making it the slowest of the three marathons I have run. As you may recall from my last post before the race, I was worried about the impact of the heat, the impact of the course having more hills than I anticipated, and my own assessment of where I was with regard to long runs (tending to fade badly after about 15 miles). All of these concerns turned out to be on point (I wish I wasn't right).

Marathon training plan #3 complete

Graph of average pace during my Boogie Nights Marathon training plan

Almost immediately after my last marathon was completed, the Blue Ridge Marathon, back in April I jumped right into a new training plan for the Boogie Marathon. Seven weeks later I have completed that training plan and tomorrow I will be running the marathon. This training plan was different from the other two I completed in that I had an abbreviated schedule to work with. Instead of at least 16 weeks in between events to prepare, I only had seven weeks. That meant a lot of work to customize a training plan and I had to compress stuff, like the taper period, to make it all fit. On the flip side, I expected I should still be in pretty good shape after coming off two marathons and around 35 or more straight weeks of training. So it is time to look back and see how things went.

Quick Product Review: GU Energy Flask and big bags of gel

GU Energy Flask with a couple 15-serving pouches

One of the things I learned last year while growing in this running hobby (lifestyle?) was all about fueling myself during long runs. As I delved into how to complete runs that lasted well over an hour I was introduced to a variety of quick to ingest "foods" that were meant specifically to help runners. Since then, I have pretty much settled on using GU Energy Gels for fuel during long runs (although the oranges that were available at one aide station during the Rocket City Marathon were absolutely delicious and hit the spot). I imagine there are a lot of other people out there using GU gels and they seem to be popular with race organizers who provide the packets at aid stations.

As I am prepping for an upcoming marathon, I recently found myself running low once again on gel packets. In the past, I've ordered boxes of the packets direct from GU. This time around though I decided to try something a little bit different as GU has introduced new 15-serving pouches of their gel. These do require something to hold a smaller amount while running though (I suppose one could carry a whole 15-serving bag) and for that, they have a new GU Energy Flask. After receiving them last week, I did give them a try during my final long run this past Sunday (really it was too short for fuel to be used at only 10.0 miles, but I did not want the marathon to be the first time I used the new flask). Read on for my thoughts.