Marathons: Paul #61, Leah #51, State #42 : Carmel Marathon 2015
18th April 2015, Carmel, Indiana, USA
Finish Time = 3:50:38
We had a flight booked to the UK on Sunday 19th April in order to be there for the London marathon the following weekend. We looked at the race listings and realised we could knock off one more State the day before! So we woke up in Indiana on the Saturday morning knowing we had to run the marathon, get back to Denver, pack our bags for the UK and head back to the airport less than 24 hours later. We were grateful of the opportunity to fit one more marathon in though, especially helping towards our State count.
We arrived at the start with just enough time to check our kit bag and use the restrooms. Then we lined up at the start and were on our way. The weather was great and the morning sun was beginning to rise.
We ran through the streets of Carmel taking in the sights. My achilles/calf had got sore towards the end of the ORRRC Marathon the weekend before and had continued to feel tender since. I hadn’t managed many training runs since then and I didn’t even get to halfway before it was causing me a lot of pain. There was nothing I could do but ignore it, which made it an uncomfortable run. It was frustrating because I hadn’t done anything in ORRRC to cause it, it had just come on towards the end of the race.
There was one really good distraction which was unique to this race, at every mile they had a different celebrity face, their name starting with A from mile 1 going to Z by mile 26. Before you got to each mile marker you could try to guess which celebrity they would have. So that’s what we did. Each of us would try to come up with some good guesses and then we’d choose one we were going to stick with. It was actually a lot of fun and I think in the end we drew on correctly guessing 2 each. It kept my mind off my leg, even when we had thought of the celebrity for a certain mile we would keep thinking, in case we came up with a better one.
In the final mile we heard someone shout out from behind “You weren’t going to wait for me?!”. It was another Marathon Maniac, Aaron, we hadn’t met him before but he caught us up and we all talked for the final mile, crossing the finish line together and achieving another sub 4 time.
Maniacs crossing the finish line
Somehow we had got VIP stickers attached to our running bibs so we made our way over to the VIP area for some additional refreshments and post-race food.
Carmel was a great marathon and it was really good to check off Indiana far earlier in the year than we had originally thought we would do it. Now I just hope I can recover before London. Somehow I always seem to end up going into it injured!
Elevation Graph from my running watch:
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