Space Coast Recap

**TL;DR**

2 PRs with the help of my friends and a positive attitude.

Heads up! This recap is a bit longer because it includes 2 races. It is Thanksgiving-themed and therefore extra cheesy. You’re welcome for the bonus content. 😝

Dear Diary,

Despite being some of the warmest and muggiest conditions I’ve raced in (including all distances), and going into Space Coast Marathon with zero expectations since it was 3 days after Thanksgiving aka wine-every-single-day-last-week, I left Florida with a 15+ minute PR. How did that happen? Proper fueling, somewhat consistent training, and inspirational friends. If I had to guess, the friends played the biggest part.

Tampa Turkey Gobble 5K Recap

Thanksgiving was great. Tom and I woke up, then met up with our 5K teammates Amy, Jared, Nick, Owen, Daphne, and Dominick downtown Tampa, to run the Tampa Turkey Gobble 5K. It’s becoming one of the friend group’s, led by Amy and Jared, fun Thanksgiving Day traditions to run together. This is the second year in which we met, ran, then had coffee. Walking to the event with our friends before the Gobble started was clutch, and helped kickstart extra happy 5K vibes.

After a little warm up, I was ready to go jog this thing. The weather was fantastic - 57°F and breezy. The first two miles felt like nothing. I was chatting up another runner during the last mile. He was wearing a San Francisco Marathon long sleeve, and I just spent the last five years living there, so — naturally, I asked him about his shirt, his experience in SF, and we talked about the city by the bay for a few minutes. I got through the finish line and realized I had accidentally PR’d, though my dang Strava was short .01 miles.

We went back to Amy and Jared’s lovely home and talked about running hills, big data, aliens, and AI over the best post-5K beverage: fresh black coffee.

Then, back to the hotel to shower, change, and head back out. I was able to spend brunch with my family and dinner with my friends, which we joke are “the family you choose.” After a big dinner and a few glasses of wine, we headed to our hotel before 11pm to be up and out by 8am. Friday morning, we had coffee in midtown Tampa with my friend and run coach, Beth, and chatted about how Space Coast was going to just be a “fun run” for several reasons. It had been less than a month since running MCM, so my body was still recovering and doubly so after partaking in all the Thanksgiving activities. Plus, I was very ready to just have some goal-less fun in one of these longer efforts. My family was considering making the drive to watch me finish, and some of my besties were coming along to catch me on the course. Plan-less plan in place, we loaded up the coffee and jumped on I-4 headed East towards O-town.

By Friday afternoon, Tom and I made it to Orlando and watched the Celtics lose to the Magic at Amway. What a bummer. After a quick nap at the hotel, we headed back out to dinner at Downtown Disney with one of Tom’s best friends from college, Pete. Over dinner, we obviously made a pact to all qualify for Boston by 45. Normal, carefree goals, etc. I aggressively renamed the group chat “We BQ by 2027” because math is hard after two glasses of cabernet.

Space Coast Marathon Weekend

Saturday, Tom and I headed to Cocoa to pick up our race packets and meet up with my friends, Brenton and Joanna, who were going to stay with us in Cocoa and watch me cross the finish at the race. To my surprise, these two brought their e-bikes to ride to different miles along the course. They even picked out a great little coastal loop for our pre-marathon shakeout. Brenton, Tom, and I went for a peaceful sunset jog while Joanna dusted off her e-bike for a little ride around the beach.

Back at our 2 bedroom hotel suite, (which could be swanky if you overlook that it was an older Residence Inn,) Chef Brenton cooked a deliciously bland pasta dinner, while I wrote a Marine Corps Marathon race recap and Joanna went to work creating posters for her to hold during the race. I’m sharing them below in chronological order.

Some of these were brutal - especially the “why’d you choose the full” sign. OMG. My favorite sign idea was also a kind of scary sign for anyone who might not have reviewed the elevation chart. It read “Are you ready for the hills?” Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cut. I think the crew determined it might ruin a runner’s day.

Sunday, race day, the alarm went off at 4am. I had a glorious 2 hours of sleep and shot out of bed to slam a water with electrolyte mix and suffer through pounding a plain protein bagel. Eating solids in the mornings is super difficult.

The race itself was tough. It was already 70°F by mile 5. I felt like I might’ve gone out too fast, despite my best efforts to manage a speed limit early on. Since I try for negative or even splits, I had made my bed. I was determined to sleep in it…

Every 3-5 miles, I saw either Brenton, Joanna, or both.

During mile 11, I thought I was going to wet myself so I made an emergency bathroom stop. This is the one thing I really, really didn’t want to do on the course. I hate stopping during a race. Between waiting for the porta-potty and doing my business, I was worried about keeping pace for even splits. Scatterbrained me dropped my handheld water bottle on the floor just as I entered the toilet. NASTY. No way I was going to drink out of that again until it met a dishwasher and high temps. I saturated the thing in hand sanitizing foam and made a mental note to find my friends and give them this handheld before I could accidentally, deliriously sip out of it.

While running sub-5K pace to make up for the minutes lost in the bathroom, I handed Brenton my soaking wet water bottle handheld at mile 12, shouting “I dropped it in the porta-potty!” Post-race, I learned that he basically wanted to saw off his hand after grabbing it from me because he thought I meant that I had dropped it into a wet urinal, since it was sopping when I handed it over. At the time of handoff, I didn’t have enough seconds to explain that to him that it was coated in sanitizer, not urine. You know your best friend REALLY loves you when he gladly takes a urine-saturated item out of your hands on race day.

**Handing off the water bottle**

“Hey! Here! I dropped this in the porta-potty!”

Thankfully, in addition to course hydration stations, a few locals had coolers with water bottles lining the road. I grabbed a bottle shortly after seeing Brenton at mile 12, and another somewhere around mile 17. At mile 20, I picked up 2 icy soaked hand towels and ran with them on my chest and neck for a few miles. I love that the course had these because it was warming up A TON in the last hour. Something really cool at about mile 16, I saw @belowaveragerunning running the 2nd half course with her brother. I follow her on Instagram and got to shout my “hello, I follow you!” and high five her while we ran past each other (I was running the opposite direction)!

I hit the wall a bit early, at mile 18. I told Brenton and Joanna when I saw them that I was hurting and “wanted to die.” I popped two Advil liquid gels and started to smile through the pain when I caught myself slowing down. I saw the clock at 30K and realized this was going to be another big PR if I could just hold pace, so that’s what my goal became. The last 6 miles were, as expected, a completely different ballgame. My feet started to feel like cement blocks. Brenton ran alongside me from 21-22. I told him I was running by feel, but wanted to stay around a 9:55 pace. He joked later that he was “the most injured and tired” of our group because he had basically tackled a brick workout, straining to catch up to me at different points on the course, then pounding out a mile at marathon pace with zero fuel and hydration.

During the last mile, I started choosing people in the distance to pass before I’d reach the finish line. I dug in and pushed. The best part of the course was that the last mile was flat, it wove around downtown Cocoa, and you couldn’t see the finish line while trekking closer. I loved this, because I started my 200m push about 600m out. It forced me to keep going, and it helped me go a little faster than I otherwise would have liked. I passed all of my running targets.

After-race controversial take: While I love that this course shares the same path as first and second half marathon runners because they bring a different energy to the course, I don’t love that the finish lines weren’t separated by course type. Without context, you can’t tell that there are 2 types of race finishes in my finisher photos - the half marathon finishers closing out their race at 4:05 gun-time, and the full marathon finishers closing out their race at 4:24 gun-time. I wish they had separate finish lines, or a bigger stagger start, like other races (SF) that share similar courses. The photographic evidence doesn’t necessarily communicate the effort.

Four long, sweaty, and grueling hours and 21 painful minutes after, I finished with a 16-minute PR, and was 12 out of 47 in my division. My official pace was 9:58-10 minute chip-time, but I ran a bit longer (for Strava) and my Garmin has me at a 9:48 pace. I’ll take either, very gladly.

Tunes I jammed out to pre-race-post linked with approximate moods. Longer gaps denote skipping through songs. A lot of dancing and some emergency Taylor Swift singalongs when I hit the wall.

Planning Next Year

I’m looking ahead at next year. While I’d love to do 3 full marathons again, I think it might be better to focus on just 2… That said, I’m already signed up to run LA, and have submitted my application to run Chicago (TBD December 7th since it’s a drawing). Maybe I go for the 1800+ ft gain and tackle SF end of July, then do another fall marathon for funsies. We’ll see.

Bonus pictures from post-race celebration, Kennedy Space Center, and City Walk with some of my family-I-choose. ♥️