Roxbury Full - December 8, 2012 - overcast, 45 degrees, humid

Well, another marathon in the bag. Where do we start? Gotta be w/ Tracy. She actually was so excited she thought w/ maybe a loop to go she might pull off a sub-4. I never saw her for about the first 15 miles but then this chick comes up and says something about "Lee, you should have ... by now" (I'm unable to remember her exact words). Anyway we then ran quite a bit together. She said something about "This course is harder than I remember it." Maybe 2 miles passed and it became clear it was her day so I told her "You got me today, Tray. Go have fun." As time passed, the lady in black got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared.

4:06:30.

Before all this I had a great guy to run with. Neil Mandel. He completes marathons in front of me by a fair amount on a regular basis so it was really fun running with him for probably 10 miles. He eventually did what Tracy did "to me," and went on ahead.

The water stop (beer stop!) and traffic / go this way volunteers were excellent. You got to know them well and you passed by each group 5 times. Oh, must not forget to mention the very beautiful out and back at the beginning. 4 miles down hill. And of course 4 miles up hill. The rock ledges on the right going out and the river view on the right coming back were unbelievably beautiful.

Brent decided the initial 8 plus two loops of 3.5 were enuf and decided to hang out w/ photographer LBrad. His friend Bill Varhue finished around 4 hours I think.

I ran 4:15. Happy with it. The last two loops were a bit tough. I became a little tired and my stomach felt a little not too good. I didn't even want to eat the candy bar Linda gave me at the beginning of loop 4. Both Mike and I haven't exactly had the best possible training opportunities and both of us were still digesting antibios. So I slowed considerably, especially on the last loop. Oh, did I mention the ratio of my number of completed marathons to my age now is greater than 1 for the first time? That's geek talk for the fact that 71/70 = 1.0142857142857142857142857142857, plus or minus.

Which leaves our very own Mr. Mike who broke 5 hours by 8 minutes. His slowest ever but you know what? I think he'll take it. He finished, he was unable to train properly and this course is big time hilly.

Emmy Stocker and Frank Colella attended, completed. Emmy clocked 9 minute miles in the last two loops! She told me she wanted to go back to bed when she arrived. So, slow start, fast finish. Frank is suffering from some weird leg problem called compacted something or other and has not run much since June. It's amazing he finished. Don't know their times.

Enuf talk. Let's get to the good stuff. Linda's pix. Check this out.