Race Report: HoCo Striders Metric Marathon

As you may recall, the wife and I are planning to do the Disney Goofey Challenge in January; this is the event that includes a half-marathon on Saturday and then the full one on Sunday. Our training plan has pretty much been based on our last marathon plan (I actually copied the week-by-week run totals) and then we are including some double weekends in there as well, where we will run the normal marathon training distance one day and a (significnatly) shorter distance the other. This seems to be working out OK, but I guess we will not really know until January. :)

So, anyway, last week we were scheduled for a 14mi run and our local running club, the Howard County Striders, was hosting their annual Metric Marathon. Basically, this is a 26.2K event instead of 26.2mi. It works out to be just about 16.2mi, which was close enough to our training goal that we opted to sign up. Since it's a local race, it's pretty cheap ($30/person) and includes a nice tech shirt and support water/Gatorade stops along the way. We actually tried to run this three years ago and also two years ago, but both of those were cancelled due to ice. Nuts. This year...perfect weather. Onward!

We showed up nice and early for same-day packet pickup. After relaxing in the truck for a little while, we went back over and chatted up the other runners, seeing many familiar faces. Then, off we went. We stuck with the 10:15min/mile pace group for a while and then fell back. Remember, this was a marathon training run and we had run 16mi the week before as well. We completed the course mostly on our own, alternating positions with two military runners who were running with 45min rucksacks on their backs. Cool stuff.

Anyway, the course for this race takes you all around Howard County. I've now run on some roads I would not have dreamed of doing so before and learned how some roads connect that I didn't know about. One of the things you need to understand about Howard County, Maryland, is that it's hilly. VERY hilly. CRAZY hilly. The Columbia Triathlon, hosted here, is widely regarded as one of the most difficult Olympic-distance races in the world, mostly due to the hills on both the bike and run courses. And the Metric Marathon course put them both to shame. This was, without a doubt, the most difficult and the most hilly 16mi I've ever run. Here is a link to the map but be warned that it provides no information about the elevation changes. Most unpleasant.

By the time we came around to the end, our friends Danny and Suzy (you remember Suzy, she's the best cycling instructor in the world) ran us in and that was that.

We got some water and pizza (Ledo Pizza...score!) and walked around a bit to calm our legs down. Our time wasn't great compared to others in the race, but I didn't expect it to be since (1) there are some crazy fast runners here in HoCo (Janelle and Keith...I'm looking at you) and (2) this was a training run and we ran it as such. So, that's the Metric Marathon. If you want a crazy hilly course and to see lots of HoCo that you probably haven't run before, this is the race for you. For me, however, one and done...I will not be racing it again.