2009 RnR Las Vegas Marathon - Race Report - Pt. 2

Mile #7 to Mile #12 heading towards downtown Las Vegas and the turn around. Temp remained in the 30's to low 40's, but the wind was still kicking around 10-12mph. As we cleared the tall casinio's, the sunshine warmed me up a little and I ditched the beanie and gloves. Ditching the gloves was a bad idea. My hands remained cold for then next 2 hours.

I had intended to use my Chickamauga fluid strategy by taking a water bottle through 13 miles. This worked strategy worked great the first time and allowed me to breeze through all the water stops that were very crowded with all of the runners on the course. At Chickamauga, it was kind of a last second strategy, where I stopped by a 7-11 on the way to the Marathon, and kind of winged it. This time I found a sweet water bottle at the airport on the way into Vegas, and kept it in the room since Thursday. Saturday night, I'm looking all around the room for the water bottle and can't find it anywhere. Crap, the service lady must of tossed it, even though it clearly was NOT IN or NEAR the trash can. Back up plan was to get a ginormous water bottle at one
of the shops at the Belligio. It was just too big to carry, and I dumped it about1/2 mile into the run.

At 10.5 the full takes a right out west of town, and the Half Marathoner's keep going down LV Blvd to the finish line. Mile time come in at : 8:33 - 8:36 - 8:34 - 8:44 - 8:47 - 8:58 (1:25:38 at Mile #10.)

Mile #13 to Mile #20 - Almost imperceptible during the run, but there is a
500 foot elevation change from mile
8 to mile 20, up hill. So much for a flatcourse. It's an out and back between mile 15 and 24 and watch the front runners going by in the other direction.
My legs began to feel heavy, and I
walked through several water stops and even stopped to stretch my quad and hip, trying to get loosened up. Mostly the same scenery. Not much crowd support and the bands were far between. I had my music player on anyway, so the lack of music didn't bother me. I was just trying to stay motivated and plug out the miles. 9:16 - 8:45 - 8:54 - 9:46 - 9:23 - 9:32 - 9:43 - 9:32 (2:58:10.51 at Mile #20)

Mile #21 to Mile #26.2 - What (gradually) goes up, must come (gradually) down. And so it was. Elevation dropped off 250 feet over last 10K. I was wondering where some of the speed came from. I didn't realize it during the race, it was so imperceptible, and when you are tired, it's sometimes hard to tell if you are going up or down. Still walked though most water stops, but never hit the proverbial wall. The Half marathoners finished up coming down LV Blvd into the Mandalay Bay front parking lot, but they banished us Full marathoners to come in the "back door" and finish on the side of the parking lot ??? Oh well. I kept thinking about "leaving it all on the race course", so I stepped the last 1.2 up as best I could. Unlike last marathon, where I was passing a lot of folks, I was the one getting passed up, until the last mile. The one thing that Rock N Roll does for the Full is to announce the names as we came in. The announcer is very up beat and it was cool still having good crowds pushing you on in that final last 385 yards (which I counted every one.) I was glad to get it over with and find Stephanie. They had setup a cool TEXT UPDATE thing, and it texted her as soon as I finished and she found me very fast. After marathon food was a joke, not even going to comment on it. 8:44 - 9:18 - 9:37 - 9:22 - 9:31 - 8:43

Official Time = 3:56:56
Garmin Time = 3:56:20 (set to auto pause).

All in All it was a great time out in Vegas. Stephanie was ultra-supportive and helped me wobble back the 1.5 miles to the Bellagio and get me into the bathtub. She even got a couple of large bags of ice and got me a great ice bath.