Diamond Valley Leftovers

The Diamond Valley Lake Marathon came and went and left me with a lot more positives then negatives. And it left me with plenty to chew on as I think about Marathon No. 5, which if all goes well will happen sometime in the summer of 2011.

As per usual, there were loads of things that happened during the DVL Marathon that couldn’t fit into the race recap, so here’s some of them.

Time Isn't On My Side: So what was my time? When I wrote the race recap I didn’t know the time yet (another byproduct of a small race). My time for the race – 4:44:25. It is my slowest marathon time yet. I don’t know… I think I should dedicate an entire blog post to this but for now I’ll just give some initial reactions. Am I disappointed? No. I got a medal and I have the distinction of having run my fourth marathon. Would I have liked a better time? Sure, of course. That kind of goes without saying. Do I have some theories as to why I finished with my personal worst time? Yes… okay, that settles it. I’m going to write this up as its own blog post, so stay tuned.

In The News: I'm not going to take credit for this one... but... I had a meeting with my editors at the local paper I freelance for and mentioned that I would be running this marathon. They'd not heard of it but seemed interested enough to take notes about it. There was indeed a news story written about the day's races. The ironic thing is, they used a freelancer! I could have written the story! Well, I guess probably not since it might not have been the best thing to do, have a participant write a story on the even he participated in, but still... Anyway, one interesting thing about the story, the winner of the marathon ran it in 2:57:08, a 51-year-old guy who had just run a 50-mile race a few weeks ago. He was the only person to finish in under three hours. Oh, and the race raised more than $35,000 for Habitat For Humanity, so it's all good.

Small But Hearty: Okay, this too will be its own blog post but I know one of the things I was concerned about was that this race was so small. It had its pluses and minuses, that’s for sure. I will say that I enjoyed the small-race aspect more than I thought I would and that I would be open to participating in small events like this for half and full marathons. I’ve run small 5Ks and 10Ks but those are, of course, much different than long-distance runs.

School Of Hard Rocks: The rocks most certainly did not rock. They were like little land mines at some point. Now, the entire course wasn’t filled with rocks. The two long straightaways on top of the dams were asphalt and very comfortable but some of the parts were quite rocky. So painful were the rocks that my feet were throbbing after the race. They’d never throbbed like that before. It could have been because of the distance of course but I do think the rocks played a role in my post-race foot-throbbing.

Sold On Sleeves: I tried something new for this marathon. Now, I didn’t go against my cardinal rule of “Nothing new on race day” but it was something I hadn’t worn during a race. I wore my cool running sleeves I won from (Mis)Adventures of a Jogging Stroller Mom. I had worn them a few times already but I think the longest run I’d worn them for was for maybe five miles. They worked great! The weather was in the 40s at the start, in the 50s at the finish and the sleeves were perfect. I figured I could just take them off and tie them around my fuel belt somehow if the sun became too warm but I left them on the whole time. Around Mile 23 I thought about taking them off but I left them on and was glad I did because it was still chilly towards the end. I’m 100 percent sold on running sleeves. And the fact that Laurie is an awesome blogger, well, I was already sold on that…

Diamond Valley Lake: Funny how there is this immense, expansive lake relatively nearby and we’d never been there and hardly knew anything about it. I guess that’s what happens when you live in SoCal. The DVL I learned is a really large lake. I learned that about as first-hand as you could imagine. We will probably go back because they have a museum there and there are some cool things for the girls that they do and have, some free workshops and things like that. We’ll be back for sure. I’m always looking for things to do over the summer, for instance, so that might not be a bad outing. Plus, I can always re-live my marathon glory.