Thanks to everybody for the well-wishes and for the queries about how I ran this weekend. I will keep this very brief since I managed to catch a small bug and am going to spend a few more days resting and not taxing myself.

The flights down to Georgia were uneventful, and it was quite hot when I got there. I managed to get in 7 or 8 miles or so Thursday afternoon and learned my way around the town that I was staying in. I got out to Wes‘s restaurant that evening and got to hang around with him and Dee Dee. They are both wonderful folk.

Friday and Saturday I spent sitting on my butt in a classroom learning what I needed to know to pass the RRCA coaching certification test. I would say that about 80% of what they taught were things that I had picked up on my own already, maybe a little more. I really enjoyed the class, especially in the second day when we generated some workout plans for “Joe Runner.” The class had a lot of experienced runners and coaches in it, though, and it was difficult to get to a consensus within the 6 and 7 person groups for how best to structure the workouts.

On Saturday, I ate some grapes in the class that I don’t think had been washed, and I had an acidic taste in my throat from there on out. Saturday night I changed hotel rooms, and the room I got was a bit dusty and caused me to start coughing a little. It was really close to start and finish for the marathon, though, which was quite nice.

The temperature dropped and it began raining Saturday night, which left mostly ideal conditions on race day. There was a lot of wind, but the temperatures were pretty steady in the mid-40s all morning. The race did a pretty good job of setting up the course, although the start and finish were less than ideal. Atlanta got some pretty serious tornadoes a few weeks ago that forced them to change the course a little.

This was probably one of the more challenging marathons that I’ve run. There were a lot of hills, and once the marathon and half marathon courses came back together there were a lot of walkers to dodge around. The finish area involved five 90 degree turns and had a brick surface, so add that in to how narrow it was and having to get around the half marathon walkers and it was difficult to get to the final line.

I treated the race as a long tempo run. When I laid out my training program, I thought that at this point I should be able to run and recover from a 3 hour marathon pretty easily. My watch had me running about 26.5 miles in 3:00:46, although my official time is about 3 minutes slower since I stopped multiple times to relieve myself in the portable johns along the way. I felt very comfortable the entire time, and don’t feel any fatigue from the run today.

Unfortunately, after running the race and then spending all day in airports or on airplanes yesterday, that acidic taste in my throat has blossomed into an all out sore throat and nasty cough. I feel okay otherwise, but I’m taking a few extra days off so that my body can fight whatever it is that is bugging me. My lymph nodes don’t seem too swollen, so I probably won’t bother going to a doctor unless it doesn’t clear up within the next day or so. Having 3 different hotel rooms in 4 nights probably didn’t help me out very much.