So there I was with 23,000 of my closest friends, and by “closest,” I mean shoulder-to-shoulder! It was about 8am Sunday morning in Beijing. We were standing just outside the new Olympic complex preparing for the Beijing Marathon. The weather was perfect for running, and the course was flat.
There were four different races all starting in the same place an following the same route for the first 4 Km. More then 7000 runners were participating in the full marathon, which meant I was running though a sea of people for 26.2 miles. It was amazing trying to fight through a crowd of more then 23,000 runners at the beginning of the race. If I had fallen, I’m sure I would have been trampled. It wasn’t until about 5Km into the race when I felt like I could run freely without bumping somebody.
I finished in 4:36:53, not my best time, but my hamstrings and quads locked up about 10 miles in because of a track-n-field day that Langfang Teachers College wanted me to run in just two days before the marathon. I over did it, pushed to hard at the track-n-field event, and it hurt me in the marathon! Needless to say, I still haven’t reached my goal of completing a marathon in less than 4 hours. After all of my training and with the perfect conditions, I should have been able to do it. Oh well, maybe next time. I’m hoping to run the Great Wall Marathon in May.
The funniest thing that happened was that they marked the course by Km, and I didn’t realize that 26.2 miles = 42Km. I thought I was running 44 Km, until I heard someone say we only had 2Km to go at the 40km marker; it was like an early Christmas gift at that point because I thought I had 4Km to go.
We finished inside one of the Olympic stadiums, and it was awesome! It was the closet I will ever come to competing in the Olympics. The music was playing, the crowd was cheering, and we all felt like we had just won the gold medal. I was so overcome when I finished that I started crying. Of course, I could have been crying because of the pain in my legs, I guess we’ll never know. Or, maybe I wasn’t crying at all, and it was just the wet sponges that they gave us. I don’t remember; the point is, I was delirious!
All in all, it was a great day. I ran with Peter Lucas-Roberts for the first kilometer, and he finished in 3:07. Jess and Shannon met us along the way, and they provided the few English words of encouragement that we heard. Afterwards, we took the train back to Langfang, and I slept well!
Brad
There were four different races all starting in the same place an following the same route for the first 4 Km. More then 7000 runners were participating in the full marathon, which meant I was running though a sea of people for 26.2 miles. It was amazing trying to fight through a crowd of more then 23,000 runners at the beginning of the race. If I had fallen, I’m sure I would have been trampled. It wasn’t until about 5Km into the race when I felt like I could run freely without bumping somebody.
I finished in 4:36:53, not my best time, but my hamstrings and quads locked up about 10 miles in because of a track-n-field day that Langfang Teachers College wanted me to run in just two days before the marathon. I over did it, pushed to hard at the track-n-field event, and it hurt me in the marathon! Needless to say, I still haven’t reached my goal of completing a marathon in less than 4 hours. After all of my training and with the perfect conditions, I should have been able to do it. Oh well, maybe next time. I’m hoping to run the Great Wall Marathon in May.
The funniest thing that happened was that they marked the course by Km, and I didn’t realize that 26.2 miles = 42Km. I thought I was running 44 Km, until I heard someone say we only had 2Km to go at the 40km marker; it was like an early Christmas gift at that point because I thought I had 4Km to go.
We finished inside one of the Olympic stadiums, and it was awesome! It was the closet I will ever come to competing in the Olympics. The music was playing, the crowd was cheering, and we all felt like we had just won the gold medal. I was so overcome when I finished that I started crying. Of course, I could have been crying because of the pain in my legs, I guess we’ll never know. Or, maybe I wasn’t crying at all, and it was just the wet sponges that they gave us. I don’t remember; the point is, I was delirious!
All in all, it was a great day. I ran with Peter Lucas-Roberts for the first kilometer, and he finished in 3:07. Jess and Shannon met us along the way, and they provided the few English words of encouragement that we heard. Afterwards, we took the train back to Langfang, and I slept well!
Brad
