This is just a quick update now that I’m home from Providence.

I ran my race plan perfectly, at least through the half marathon. I was at 77:24 at halfway.

Then I blew up. My left calf got a little tweaked around 15 miles in, so I slowed down and changed my gait a bit, and then things just went downhill fast and a bunch of guys caught me. over the second half of the race I lost 11 minutes.

Had I not gone out so aggressively (2:35:00 pace) then would I have been able to run under 2:40? Possibly. I am sure that I could have PRed at least.

Do I regret having gone out so hard? Not in the least. I don’t think that I could have won with the competition this year, and had there been a chance then I’d have needed to run over my head to do it.

I just wasn’t in the kind of shape I needed for the strategy I used, but as Sir Roger Bannister said, “If a man coaches himself, then he has only himself to blame when he is beaten.” I took a big risk, and I didn’t fall apart as much as I might have but more than I wanted to.

I’m happy with my race, but I’m disappointed in how it went, if that makes sense. It was a worthwhile experience even if I didn’t meet my goals, which were further hampered by stopping a few times to relieve myself and by getting punched in the groin late in the race.

I’ll have more details in a full race report, but I just wanted to let everybody know how I did in case you didn’t catch my comment this morning in the prediction thread. (Congratulations to Mark for being the closest to how fast I’d actually run.)