The bare thought of running the Marathon in Quito was first initiated about three weeks ago when Oscar found the event on the internet and announced he was running. I’ve been thinking about running a marathon for a long time but the timing of this one was no good since my knee has been out of function since end of April and it was more than 2 month’s since I ran last time. So I dismissed the idea of running the full marathon but contemplated the idea of being able to run the half marathon instead. We started running at evenings after work for about an hour (as I mentioned in earlier posts) and my knee felt pretty well, so I figured the half marathon should be doable. However, last week when Oscar went for a three-hour run to practise for the 42km he was about to run, I tagged a long with the intention to stop as soon as my knee told me to. But it never told me and when we got back it still didn’t hurt. So I decided to sign up for the full marathon.
I met some complications though… The marathon was yesterday, Sunday, and we did the last training run on Thursday. This training run set of some sort of reaction, making me dyspepctic (magsjuk, aldrig hört talas om ordet heller). I had stomach pains and everything I ate… came out again within seconds, literally. Saturday came and the pains was gone, but still: no matter what I ate it didn’t want to stay in my system, so I started to get a bit nervous whether I’d make the 42k’s or not. Nevertheless, Oscar and me got on a 3-hour bus ride to Quito, picked up chips and start numbers and installed ourselves in a hostel ready to wake up at 0400 hours for a pasta breakfast.
The start went off at 0530 in the morning in downtown Quito. The run started out good, I had a good pace and the temperature was pleasant around 11 degrees. After the first 10k’s I was well ahead of my scheduled time.
The stomach pains started after around 13km. After another kilometre I was in cold sweat, knowing what I had to do – I reckon dad is familiar with this feeling. I took refuge in to the park we we’re running in and when I came back on track I felt better, but not good. I knew I didn’t have much carbs or nutrition in my system and since I was looking at another 30km ahead, I crabbed half a banana and drank some Gatorade at the next pit stop. Bad idea. After about 25km I was in sever pains and cold sweat again, and the procedure had to be repeated. After this my stomach actually felt better, and I could focus totally on the pain I started getting from running. To summarize the rest of the run: it was probably the most painful thing I’ve done, both physically and mentally. Of course my legs hurt but also other weird places such as from inside my chest and the sides of my stomach.
Well that was it. Something I’m very glad I did when looking back – even though I could have done without the stomach problems. Time: around 4h 10min. This was by the way enough to reward me the title of best Swede in Maraton de Quito 2010;)