Mainzathon Race Report
Hello, my name is Tem, and I ran a marathon yesterday.
Yes, unlike my first one I actually ran one this time, all the way to the finish line. And yes, I am epically sore today. I abseiled down the stairs to the bathroom backwards this morning, and I suspect I narrowly escaped being a complete Dalek/Mariah Carey crossover and not do stairs at all. Epic soreness is epic.
Four Near Misses Make a Happy Tem
Coming to think of it, I narrowly escaped a number of things in the lead-up to this race actually, all of which would have made the experience significantly less enjoyable:
I narrowly missed not being able to run the race at all on account of epic shin splints three weeks before race day. Thankfully, I have a very helpful orthopedist who fixed me up with judicious application of kinesio tape, proper shoe inserts, and a liberal helping of the placebo effect because the Doctor, he is right. Doubly so if he takes you seriously as a slightly overweight distance runner! Also, the collective good thoughts of the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
runners community probably had something to do with my leg's amazing recovery.
The magic tape in question. Also pictured: my faaabulous gold lamé arm warmers and matching nail polish.
I also narrowly missed being part of a newsworthy football fan melee – it so happened that race number pick-up day coincided with the Hamburg vs. Mainz match that would decide whether Hamburg's team, the HSV, would drop out of premier league for the first time in their history. Now, if you grew up in the lowlands of North Germany like I did, that's a big deal because people have flagpoles in their gardens flying either the HSV emblem or the other local team's colours. And if you're planning on running a race in Mainz the next day, the presence of a couple of thousand potentially violent fans from Hamburg is not so enticing. Fortunately for us, the city of Mainz had done its homework and stationed enough police around the stadium that nothing untoward happened…
Then, I narrowly missed missing the Eurovision Song Contest the night before the race because our satellite dish was on the fritz again and we were reduced to watching the livestream with atrocious picture quality but at least fine sound. Also, yes I actually got to comment "Um, Conchita Wurst is not a food item" legitimately on Facebook! To be fair, the recipient of that comment, my teammate Mary, had the excuse of having just finished a big-ass triathlon in Spain that day and consequently completely missing the ESC.
Finally, I narrowly missed racing as a 75-year-old guy named Wolfgang because that's the guy who traded me his race number for a refund of the starter fee because he couldn't make it and registration closes ridiculously early for this one. Thankfully, the nice people at the race's aptly named "Troubledesk" (yes, one word. This is Germany.) helped fix that, and so I managed to get a female race number in the correct age group, albeit without my name on it.
Which made it extra surprising when, standing in the last corral with all the other slow folks and nameless late registrants, I sneezed loudly and received a "Gesundheit, [Tem]!" in return. Turns out that Ria, who I used to sing with a few years ago, was running the half. We wished each other all the best, and even though we didn't see each other again after that, we managed to have virtually identical half-marathon times.
Actually, this was the third person I met in the course of this race that I hadn't seen in a while and totally didn't expect to see. The second one was Tammy who's a friend of a friend of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ell's and whom I'd last seen at the Frankfurt sprint triathlon (albeit in a wetsuit and with a swim cap on so no wonder I didn't recognize her); and the third, who absolutely takes the cake in terms of surprisingness, was Brigitte who I'd gone to college with in Mainz and whom I literally had not seen in almost 20 years. She wasn't running the race (although she did inform me she'd hiked the Way of St. James last summer) but we spent the train ride back out east together on the Saturday, reminiscing about our fun and dangerous past as chemistry students all those years ago…
Run a Marathon Already, Will You?
The race itself was a pleasure to participate in – from the wealth of toilets strategically scattered around the entire start area to the helpful and earnest volunteers (one of whom cornered my wife when he heard her American accent and interviewed her about whether she thought that Saucony's motto "Find your strong." was, in fact, proper English or not) to the relaxed and relatively small crowd of runners, this was a nice way to spend a Sunday.
Except, you know, with 26.2 miles to run.
So my strategy, if you can call it that, was to avoid last year's wall-hitting experience, listen to my injured leg, take it slooow, eat and drink a lot, and make it to the finish line with a smile if possible. The nature of that finish line was to be determined on the fly – yes, this race actually allowed for fickleness and any marathoner deciding to cut it short and just run through the half-marathon gate automatically got a half-marathon finish time. Amusingly, there was also a two-thirds option, an additional safety in case the shin started really hurting or the three weeks of enforced rest came to bite me in the gluteus maximus. So I was, in fact, fairly confident I would not have a terrible day.
Actually, the only thing the organizers didn't manage to get right was the weather – it was cold and rainy all day, with gusty winds that blew over traffic barriers and really whipped the faster folks in the face as they tackled the course's only hill, a big old Rhine bridge.
Wet runners running across wet bridge, leaving Mainz for parts of Wiesbaden that insist on also being called Mainz-Something. Yes, it's a bit of a weird and complicated history.
True to its reputation as one of the two carnival capitals of Germany, Mainz attracted a fun crowd of runners – there were several life-sized wheat beer bottles racing (ell suspects a sixpack of them but we only saw three between the two of us), the inevitable Pheidippides whom I passed around mile 16, and a gang of dwarves complete with Snow White in a Plexiglas coffin on a pram undercarriage, decked out so nicely you could barely tell she'd started life as an inflatable sex doll. Her entourage of dwarves kept up a series of dwarfishly-reworded football chants throughout the race (they ran the half marathon) but were a bit weak on math seeing as there were, well, eight of them.
Six of the eight dwarves finishing the half marathon.
After the half-marathoners peeled off to their finish line, things got a bit lonely, and then lonelier still after the 2/3-marathoners finished on the other side of the Rhine. German runners are fast (or rather, slow German runners don't race, which is a pity) so at a goal time of just over 4:30, I was definitely at the tail end of the field. Or rather, at the tail end of the daisy chain, with each runner only just being able to see the one in front as we meandered our way through backstreets, neighbourhoods, and industrial areas. Even so, the spectators proved that Mainzers really know how to party, making a cheerful racket for each and every one of us despite the awful weather, blaring music off their balconies, shouting encouragement (on account of not having my name on my bib, I got called "golden girl" a number of times. Which given that I walk like C-3PO today is more than appropriate.), and even offering additional drinks and snacks.
The music along the course also definitely transcended the limitations of what you usually hear at races, offering everything from a six-piece marching band playing an arrangement of the Tetris theme all the way to a wheelchair club blaring the Narrhallamarsch (think oompah carnival theme) at unsuspecting racers. Yes, in May. This is Mainz.
Actually, it'll be interesting to compare this party crowd to the spectators at the triathlon I'll be doing in Cologne, the other Carnival capital of Germany, later in the year.
Yes, this guy is supposed to wear pink (long story – very camp parody of Karl May's famous Native American character, Winnetou, that literally every German born in the 20th century grew up reading), and was visibly pleased when I called him by his name, Abahatschi. To which he did not, in fact, reply 'Gesundheit'.
So, the half-marathoners were gone, the 2/3-marathoners were gone, mile 20 rolled around, and at this point a rotund bearded motorcycle cop in the old grass green police leathers pulls up next to me and starts chatting with me, informing me that since my fabulous gold arm warmers are so conspicuous, he's been keeping track of me and I've picked off several people since he last saw me. He added that there were "exactly seven women and about 60 guys" still behind me, that the broom car (which actually sported a big old-fashioned broom sticking out the passenger-side window) was miles behind me, and that I was looking like I would make it to the finish just fine, before pulling off to do his duty, which apparently involved chatting with the runners… actually, he was probably simply enjoying dealing with a friendly crowd after the previous day's tense football match.
The amazing thing was that I felt fine at that point, jogging through the neighbourhoods, smiling at people, waving my fabulously gold-lamé-clad arms around, picking off pained-looking men one by one. Towards the end, around mile 23, I felt like I wanted to walk, but never like I had to walk – which was an amazing feeling after my first marathon's wall-hitting experience. Here I was, still running, getting tired and a bit achy but in no acute pain and, most importantly, not feeling nauseous or emotionally unbalanced like in 2012.
My mile splits on the GPS watch look a bit funny though – while my actual running pace was pretty constantly between 10:05 and 10:20, about half my miles are noticeably slower because I walked to drink or eat about every other mile. Perversely, drinking a cup of water every couple of miles made sure that I was thirsty for another one at the next water stop, and four energy gels and the remains of at least two bananas lovingly dismembered by volunteers made sure I wasn't starving at the finish line either. I even took the time to jump into a portaloo twice while on the course and pee in a leisurely and rule-conforming fashion. Lots of little breaks that, while slowing me down overall, made sure that not only did I make it to the finish with a smile but I actually negative split this one.
The last bit of nastiness that my erstwhile hometown threw at us in an effort to make us stay longer: these wet cobblestones slowed everyone down or had us running very weird tangents along the red sandstone bits in the middle that were less slippery, but that part was mercifully short, and I knew that once I saw the cinema at the end, I was almost home.
The course was actually bit long, 26.4 miles according to my andell's watches but who cares when there's cheering and a medal and yay WALKING at the finish line. And ell, all emotional after having run a fantastic race herself, happy to see me jogging across the finish line smiling, still several minutes faster than two years ago.
We rounded the day off with a tepid shower provided by the local fire department and a very, very nice massage provided by students from the local physiotherapy school. Who took their sweet time with my legs because there was absolutely no line behind me.
Yes, sometimes being slow really pays. :)
Yes, unlike my first one I actually ran one this time, all the way to the finish line. And yes, I am epically sore today. I abseiled down the stairs to the bathroom backwards this morning, and I suspect I narrowly escaped being a complete Dalek/Mariah Carey crossover and not do stairs at all. Epic soreness is epic.
Four Near Misses Make a Happy Tem
Coming to think of it, I narrowly escaped a number of things in the lead-up to this race actually, all of which would have made the experience significantly less enjoyable:
I narrowly missed not being able to run the race at all on account of epic shin splints three weeks before race day. Thankfully, I have a very helpful orthopedist who fixed me up with judicious application of kinesio tape, proper shoe inserts, and a liberal helping of the placebo effect because the Doctor, he is right. Doubly so if he takes you seriously as a slightly overweight distance runner! Also, the collective good thoughts of the
runners community probably had something to do with my leg's amazing recovery.The magic tape in question. Also pictured: my faaabulous gold lamé arm warmers and matching nail polish.
I also narrowly missed being part of a newsworthy football fan melee – it so happened that race number pick-up day coincided with the Hamburg vs. Mainz match that would decide whether Hamburg's team, the HSV, would drop out of premier league for the first time in their history. Now, if you grew up in the lowlands of North Germany like I did, that's a big deal because people have flagpoles in their gardens flying either the HSV emblem or the other local team's colours. And if you're planning on running a race in Mainz the next day, the presence of a couple of thousand potentially violent fans from Hamburg is not so enticing. Fortunately for us, the city of Mainz had done its homework and stationed enough police around the stadium that nothing untoward happened…
Then, I narrowly missed missing the Eurovision Song Contest the night before the race because our satellite dish was on the fritz again and we were reduced to watching the livestream with atrocious picture quality but at least fine sound. Also, yes I actually got to comment "Um, Conchita Wurst is not a food item" legitimately on Facebook! To be fair, the recipient of that comment, my teammate Mary, had the excuse of having just finished a big-ass triathlon in Spain that day and consequently completely missing the ESC.
Finally, I narrowly missed racing as a 75-year-old guy named Wolfgang because that's the guy who traded me his race number for a refund of the starter fee because he couldn't make it and registration closes ridiculously early for this one. Thankfully, the nice people at the race's aptly named "Troubledesk" (yes, one word. This is Germany.) helped fix that, and so I managed to get a female race number in the correct age group, albeit without my name on it.
Which made it extra surprising when, standing in the last corral with all the other slow folks and nameless late registrants, I sneezed loudly and received a "Gesundheit, [Tem]!" in return. Turns out that Ria, who I used to sing with a few years ago, was running the half. We wished each other all the best, and even though we didn't see each other again after that, we managed to have virtually identical half-marathon times.
Actually, this was the third person I met in the course of this race that I hadn't seen in a while and totally didn't expect to see. The second one was Tammy who's a friend of a friend of
ell's and whom I'd last seen at the Frankfurt sprint triathlon (albeit in a wetsuit and with a swim cap on so no wonder I didn't recognize her); and the third, who absolutely takes the cake in terms of surprisingness, was Brigitte who I'd gone to college with in Mainz and whom I literally had not seen in almost 20 years. She wasn't running the race (although she did inform me she'd hiked the Way of St. James last summer) but we spent the train ride back out east together on the Saturday, reminiscing about our fun and dangerous past as chemistry students all those years ago…Run a Marathon Already, Will You?
The race itself was a pleasure to participate in – from the wealth of toilets strategically scattered around the entire start area to the helpful and earnest volunteers (one of whom cornered my wife when he heard her American accent and interviewed her about whether she thought that Saucony's motto "Find your strong." was, in fact, proper English or not) to the relaxed and relatively small crowd of runners, this was a nice way to spend a Sunday.
Except, you know, with 26.2 miles to run.
So my strategy, if you can call it that, was to avoid last year's wall-hitting experience, listen to my injured leg, take it slooow, eat and drink a lot, and make it to the finish line with a smile if possible. The nature of that finish line was to be determined on the fly – yes, this race actually allowed for fickleness and any marathoner deciding to cut it short and just run through the half-marathon gate automatically got a half-marathon finish time. Amusingly, there was also a two-thirds option, an additional safety in case the shin started really hurting or the three weeks of enforced rest came to bite me in the gluteus maximus. So I was, in fact, fairly confident I would not have a terrible day.
Actually, the only thing the organizers didn't manage to get right was the weather – it was cold and rainy all day, with gusty winds that blew over traffic barriers and really whipped the faster folks in the face as they tackled the course's only hill, a big old Rhine bridge.
Wet runners running across wet bridge, leaving Mainz for parts of Wiesbaden that insist on also being called Mainz-Something. Yes, it's a bit of a weird and complicated history.
True to its reputation as one of the two carnival capitals of Germany, Mainz attracted a fun crowd of runners – there were several life-sized wheat beer bottles racing (
ell suspects a sixpack of them but we only saw three between the two of us), the inevitable Pheidippides whom I passed around mile 16, and a gang of dwarves complete with Snow White in a Plexiglas coffin on a pram undercarriage, decked out so nicely you could barely tell she'd started life as an inflatable sex doll. Her entourage of dwarves kept up a series of dwarfishly-reworded football chants throughout the race (they ran the half marathon) but were a bit weak on math seeing as there were, well, eight of them.Six of the eight dwarves finishing the half marathon.
After the half-marathoners peeled off to their finish line, things got a bit lonely, and then lonelier still after the 2/3-marathoners finished on the other side of the Rhine. German runners are fast (or rather, slow German runners don't race, which is a pity) so at a goal time of just over 4:30, I was definitely at the tail end of the field. Or rather, at the tail end of the daisy chain, with each runner only just being able to see the one in front as we meandered our way through backstreets, neighbourhoods, and industrial areas. Even so, the spectators proved that Mainzers really know how to party, making a cheerful racket for each and every one of us despite the awful weather, blaring music off their balconies, shouting encouragement (on account of not having my name on my bib, I got called "golden girl" a number of times. Which given that I walk like C-3PO today is more than appropriate.), and even offering additional drinks and snacks.
The music along the course also definitely transcended the limitations of what you usually hear at races, offering everything from a six-piece marching band playing an arrangement of the Tetris theme all the way to a wheelchair club blaring the Narrhallamarsch (think oompah carnival theme) at unsuspecting racers. Yes, in May. This is Mainz.
Actually, it'll be interesting to compare this party crowd to the spectators at the triathlon I'll be doing in Cologne, the other Carnival capital of Germany, later in the year.
Yes, this guy is supposed to wear pink (long story – very camp parody of Karl May's famous Native American character, Winnetou, that literally every German born in the 20th century grew up reading), and was visibly pleased when I called him by his name, Abahatschi. To which he did not, in fact, reply 'Gesundheit'.
So, the half-marathoners were gone, the 2/3-marathoners were gone, mile 20 rolled around, and at this point a rotund bearded motorcycle cop in the old grass green police leathers pulls up next to me and starts chatting with me, informing me that since my fabulous gold arm warmers are so conspicuous, he's been keeping track of me and I've picked off several people since he last saw me. He added that there were "exactly seven women and about 60 guys" still behind me, that the broom car (which actually sported a big old-fashioned broom sticking out the passenger-side window) was miles behind me, and that I was looking like I would make it to the finish just fine, before pulling off to do his duty, which apparently involved chatting with the runners… actually, he was probably simply enjoying dealing with a friendly crowd after the previous day's tense football match.
The amazing thing was that I felt fine at that point, jogging through the neighbourhoods, smiling at people, waving my fabulously gold-lamé-clad arms around, picking off pained-looking men one by one. Towards the end, around mile 23, I felt like I wanted to walk, but never like I had to walk – which was an amazing feeling after my first marathon's wall-hitting experience. Here I was, still running, getting tired and a bit achy but in no acute pain and, most importantly, not feeling nauseous or emotionally unbalanced like in 2012.
My mile splits on the GPS watch look a bit funny though – while my actual running pace was pretty constantly between 10:05 and 10:20, about half my miles are noticeably slower because I walked to drink or eat about every other mile. Perversely, drinking a cup of water every couple of miles made sure that I was thirsty for another one at the next water stop, and four energy gels and the remains of at least two bananas lovingly dismembered by volunteers made sure I wasn't starving at the finish line either. I even took the time to jump into a portaloo twice while on the course and pee in a leisurely and rule-conforming fashion. Lots of little breaks that, while slowing me down overall, made sure that not only did I make it to the finish with a smile but I actually negative split this one.
The last bit of nastiness that my erstwhile hometown threw at us in an effort to make us stay longer: these wet cobblestones slowed everyone down or had us running very weird tangents along the red sandstone bits in the middle that were less slippery, but that part was mercifully short, and I knew that once I saw the cinema at the end, I was almost home.
The course was actually bit long, 26.4 miles according to my and
ell's watches but who cares when there's cheering and a medal and yay WALKING at the finish line. And ell, all emotional after having run a fantastic race herself, happy to see me jogging across the finish line smiling, still several minutes faster than two years ago.We rounded the day off with a tepid shower provided by the local fire department and a very, very nice massage provided by students from the local physiotherapy school. Who took their sweet time with my legs because there was absolutely no line behind me.
Yes, sometimes being slow really pays. :)
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