Toronto Waterfront Marathon - Race
I arrived at the start area about half an hour before my wave was due to go. Dropped off my bag in seconds, and turned around to see what the portable toilet situation was. The situation was this: hundreds of people snaking into the distance, looking like about an hour wait. So I kind of gave up and headed towards my corral until I noticed a bunch of people in running gear hanging around the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. Nobody was paying too much attention to comings and goings, so I nipped in and managed to get to their very nice bathroom. Then I drank a full bottle of water while waiting and still ended up needing to pee for the entire race, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose a minute that way. Anyway, that’s the pee-related bit of the day over and I kind of now regret dedicating the entire first paragraph to it.
The race itself was very smooth, my perpetual race problem is going out too fast, burning out and collapsing a bit on the final third. Today, however, I went out too fast and then maintained it for three hours. The first, really, eighteen kilometres were unremarkable, other than me realising I seemed to have not dropped off a ~4:25/km pace. Too fast, I thought, this will come back and bite me. I had a brief chat with the 3:10 pacer, who seemed to be going too fast, but then I sped up and that was the last I saw of him.
The bit I was worried about was smack in the middle, where the half marathon finished and the full split off to the wilderness. There’s a long chunk under the Gardiner Expressway, which is basically an incredibly thick piece of concrete between a given runner and a working GPS signal. Things did begin to go a little haywire in there, it started to think I was getting slower and slower, whereas in actuality I had significantly picked up the pace to get out of there ASAP. However, on getting out, the GPS tried to right itself and started telling me I was doing a sub 3 min/km pace until I did a manual lap button press on the 22km marker and the whole thing kind of evened itself out. The funky GPS meant that when I finished, I had racked up 42.7km, a whole half kilometre more than what was intended. Did I actually run that extra distance? We will never know the answer (it’s probably no).
After a weird little loop up some cycle path, we came back down and headed east along Lakeshore, spending a long bit of time on the road I actually run regularly. The turnaround point was on the 32km mark, the longest I had done in training, and left me off into the thin air of no man’s land time, a distance beyond which I hadn’t done in anger since the Dublin Marathon in 2018, in the before times. Starting to ache a bit now, heading back west, counting the kilometres, nine to go, eight to go.
The last five were probably the toughest I’ve ever done. My legs had started to realise what I had put them through, and they were not pleased with it. My splits were dropping into the 4:31 and 4:32/km forcing me to pick up speed to stay under 4:30. I had long since built up enough of a buffer that a 3:10 finish was pretty much guaranteed, but with less than 5k to go, it was a matter of principle. People were dropping off in this segment, holding hamstrings, sitting on the edge with head in hands, one guy throwing up bright yellow. I was feeling a little ill myself, having favoured electrolyte drinks over water and eating? drinking? three Gu gels.
Nonetheless, I maintained pace. Passed people out. Sucks to be you, my legs. Mentally breaking it into segments, 2km until 40, then 2km until the end, the 0.2km until the real end, and then 0.5km until the real real end after accounting for GPS. My name was on the number I had pinned to my shirt, and I noticed people actually saying it when cheering me on. Mispronouncing it, like everyone outside Ireland, stretching it into a single syllable Cohlm, but it was nice. The last kilometre I somehow pulled a reservoir of strength and passed another half dozen people, crossed the line in 3:08:08. Personal best by 11 minutes over my last marathon (5 years ago). Genuinely nearly cried at being done. Never wanted to run again. Didn’t even want to walk out of the finish area.
After that I joined the shuffling hundreds and thousands, the zombie plague, as we all had medals placed around our necks and joined a queue for yoghurt and bananas.
Final position 329 out of 4,524 (or, if you like, top 7%). This may well qualify me for Boston 2025.
If you enjoyed that, think how much you’d enjoy a completely unrelated short story I finished earlier this year.