Let’s call it a comeback! After a failed marathon last fall, I’ve finally completed my first full marathon in almost two years. Little Rock was in March of 2020, the week before everything started shutting down here in most of the States. This past weekend, I redeemed myself and had a finish in Huntsville, Alabama, with the wonderful Rocket City Marathon!
My trip started out eventfully Saturday morning (I originally was supposed to fly out Friday but had to make some itinerary adjustments due to family commitments) as I got sick on the way to the airport. I think it was a weird combo of heartburn and caffeine after waking up at 3am, but that was thankfully the only thing that derailed me. Still made my Atlanta flight just fine, but then we had a late pushback AND had to get de-iced. Wound up delaying us by over half an hour, which ate into the entirety of my buffer time for my Atlanta layover.
As we landed, I had to ask several people who were just chilling to move and I finally got power-walking from A to C terminals. Thankfully, there was a crew of folks making the dash to the same Huntsville flight from some other late-arriving planes, and we all made it. I had a couple loudly disagree with me about which seat was actually the window seat, but they were already so settled-in and it was supposed to be a quick puddle-jump, so I just took the aisle seat.
Unfortunately, it was not a quick puddle-jump.
Because the visibility was so crappy in Huntsville and it was such a short flight, our push-back kept getting delayed. We were originally supposed to leave Atlanta around 8:30 but wound up leaving closer to 10:30. The crew was great and kept us updated the whole time, every fifteen minutes or so, and the flight attendants brought around some water and snacks after about an hour. I wound up getting a lot of writing and some reading done, so it worked out for me.
The actual flight to Huntsville was uneventful, and the airport was clean and easy to navigate. I picked up my rental car in no time at all, headed for the expo, got myself parked, and made it into the VBC Hall. When I first got there, it was a bit of a cluster. There was a line death-spiraling in on itself that nobody really knew what it was for. After standing in that line for a few minutes, me and a few other people realized it wasn’t the right line for our races. I got my bib, t-shirt, and race packet pretty easily, just had difficulty balancing it all without a bag or anything. Since I wasn’t planning on using gear check Sunday morning, I didn’t necessarily need a bag for that, but even a leftover Wal-Mart bag would have been useful.
I looked around at the vendors and everything, but didn’t see anything that really sparked my interest. I really wanted to buy a finisher’s technical pullover, but they were dated with 2021, so that was a bit of a bummer. Either way, I headed back to the car pretty quickly, and went for my traditional pre-race carbo-load at Olive Garden. Chicken and gnocchi soup, breadsticks, and fettucine alfredo are always the go-to; however, I forgot the lunch sizes aren’t available on the weekends, so I got the full portion and wound up boxing a lot of it for a later reheated dinner.
Got settled into my AirBNB, took a little bit of a nap after only getting three hours of sleep the night before, and walked over to Dairy Queen to get a Blizzard as a Saturday treat and froze the rest for a post-marathon treat. I had the rest of my Olive Garden, took a quick shower, and got myself settled into bed pretty early so I could get as much sleep as possible.
That amount didn’t wind up being a ton of sleep, but it’s fine. I wound up waking up around 4am, with a precautionary 4:30 wake-up call from my Mom in case I overslept. At that point, I was already wide-awake, hydrating, and mostly dressed. I was extremely liberal with my Vaseline application because of the projected rain throughout the race, and I played around with the distribution of all my things in my race belt.
I headed out around 5am because I didn’t want to be late for the early start. I wound up parking in a further lot than I had the day before, but the one I had scoped out didn’t open until 5:30am and I didn’t want to have any chance of cutting it close. Because of my early departure, in true Tory fashion, I was early to the early start.
It was a little breezy with sprinkling rain every so often as we got ready for the early start. The good news is that we all were camped out under the awnings of the VBC until about four minutes until race start. There were some good pre-race announcements and reminders (“Have fun!” and information about not passing the six-hour pacers until a specific points on the course), and then off we went.
The six-hour pacers at the front were doing a 2/:30 interval, which I wish I would have known ahead of time. I usually do longer intervals (2:30/2 in this case) so I wound up rubber-banding with the front cluster of folks for the first three miles or so. I completely missed the first mile marker, but it was an easy warm-up. We were all supposed to have lights of some sort for both safety and visibility, and a woman next to me had the most intense headlamp I’ve ever seen and it was incredible.
By about mile three, I was chatting with some folks nearby as we started to fall off the six-hour pace pack. Though I had wanted to hang with them for as long as possible, my heart rate was already starting to spike and I knew that I was going to be in a world of hurt if I pushed it too hard in the first 10 miles. Instead, I happily chatted with the other early-starters nearby and we all were in a surprisingly good mood for how early it was.
Just after mile 4, there was an entire neighborhood dressed up as Wacky Waving Arm-Flailing Inflatable Tubemen, so that was definitely a pseudo-hallucination before I realized it was actually happening. That gave me a great laugh just before 7am, and I went into my second hour in a pretty great mood.
There was some more happy chatting with other nearby runners, some wisecracks with volunteers, and profuse thanking of the traffic control folks throughout the race. At around 7:45, the first regular-starters started running by, which is always both demoralizing and uplifting. Even though they were working their asses off, so many still took time to say great job or offer fist-bumps or high-fives.
The amount of runners surrounding us really picked up at around mile 8 as both Front Halfers and full marathoners started dashing by. Just past mile 9, we ran through a park and past a bunch of trains. A group of guys nearby and I wound up shouting “I like trains!” almost simultaneously, so that gave me a great laugh.
It’s also important to mention my nutrition and hydration plans throughout this race, because I think that’s where things went sideways during the Marshall Marathon. My goal was to take a gel every four miles or so at whatever aid station was nearest to that point, and I took salt packets at every single water station in between. After the first three aid stations or so, I wound up taking two waters at a time – one to get my gel or salt packet down and one to just drink to rehydrate. It wound up working throughout the entire race (spoilers!) and I never felt myself bonking nutritionally or getting light-headed or dizzy or anything that had been a concern in previous races or training runs.
To be honest, as a full marathoner, I completely forgot that the Front-Halfers were actually going to be with us for the full front half. As mile 11.5 hit and I could see the VBC (where the full marathon finish was), I couldn’t make the mental math check out and allow the half marathoners to finish in there. Instead, as we past mile 12 and approached mile 13, I finally remembered that they had a separate finish for the Front Half. Oops. This was also the point in the race where I started doing mental math or pulling out my calculator every mile or so to determine how much buffer time I had between me and the 7-hour pacers. It still seemed at that point that I had buffer time, but it was way too close for my liking and based on my past race performances, I knew that I would start slowing down in the back half.
As the Front Halfers pulled off to their finish and the full marathoners kept going, I gave my mom a quick call to update her on my progress. She was tracking me on the app, and it turns out it was giving much more granular tracking than I had expected – enough that my mom said she could tell when I was on my intervals because my moving speed went up enough to notice. As I hung up, I pulled out my headphones and got myself situated with my punk rock Pandora station.
There was a stretch between miles 13 and 15 or so where the overpasses and hills just were brutal. As someone from Western PA, I know that they weren’t all that bad, but they definitely felt like mountains after the halfway point in the marathon. A guy who was clearly cramping up after the undulations and I were joking that most marathon courses seem to stack all the big hills in the back half to not frighten off the half-marathoners.
Running through the UAH campus was pretty quick, but it also gave me a few downhills to work with and some great tunes to keep my legs turning over pretty quickly. Even though my overall pace was slowing down a bit, I still had the get-up-and-go in my legs to do some brief running segments to pick up the pace.
As we approached mile 18, we could see the US Space and Rocket Museum come into (relatively foggy) view. It was still sprinkling, and running on some overpasses had chilled us off a bit. Some folks had set up a food-ish station right before entering into the Museum grounds, so I snagged some pickle juice and some pickles. Sadly, I saw some empty two-liters of Coke on the ground, which I had been craving since about mile 8.
I snagged a selfie with the Saturn V, which was the whole objective of this trip, if I’m being honest. We also got to run past the Space Camp facilities and through the back section of the Museum grounds. From there, we took a turn down a back path that connected us to the Botanical Gardens. One thing I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere was that the displays for the holiday light show were all up (unfortunately not on, tough). As there were some tough sections in the Botanical Gardens, it was really nice to have something to distract myself with as we ran by.
Just after we hit Mile 20 in the Botanical Gardens, Bohemian Rhapsody came on my Pandora station and that was probably the most bad-ass I felt throughout the entire course. I came up a hill before the last aid station in the Gardens, and I felt really strong. Just after that, I gave my mom another call to update her on my progress. She was out to lunch with my brother and had her phone out on the table so the app was keeping track of my progress – I found out later that when we hung up, my brother was like “Why does she DO this??”
The last five miles or so weren’t particularly bad when it comes to the course itself, but mentally was where I started fighting with myself. I knew I had about 15 minutes of buffer between my moving pace and when the 7-hour pacers were supposed to cross the line. Mile 22 in particular was rough, as we were just going down a straightaway in one neighborhood with a church doing an aid station and then a turn down another long straightaway. Mentally, this was the point where I started asking myself how much I could really slow down. It also didn’t help that I was eating slightly stale M&M’s from the aid station, so I really had to concentrate on not choking on those.
At Mile 23, I wound up switching to the music that I call my “secret weapon” because I could feel myself mentally flagging – a Spotify playlist full of marching band stand tunes and covers. Most of them have a BPM that’s really good for the speed that I was moving, and they just bring my heart joy. It wound up working, because each of my last three miles was faster than the last.
The most frustrating part of being a Back of the Packer is that regular people get irritated that the race is still happening. I totally understand wanting to let people through when possible to not throw off their usual routines, but the amount of cars just cutting through the course or somehow coming around corners they shouldn’t have been able to access was a little scary. I only had one headphone in for the majority of the last five miles, just because I knew we were starting to get to the point where people were making their own decisions without a care for those of us still out there trying our hardest.
At the bridge just before Mile 25, I could look off to my left and see the folks trickling into the back of the VBC where the finish line was. I found myself doing more frequent run intervals and looping around the last mile or so of the course. As we approached the last loop around the the lake in Big Spring Park, I pulled out my truest of secret weapons – every time I feel myself flagging as I approach a finish line, I turn on the recording of the popular music show the year I did college marching band. As I listened to those songs, I found myself getting teary-eyed as I circled the lake.
Ever since my HS diagnosis last year, I wasn’t sure if running marathons was still going to be a possibility for me. After having to drop out of the Marshall Marathon in 2021, my self-confidence about long-distance running had dropped further and further. But as I rounded the corner at Mile 26 to loop around the back side of the building, the only thing I felt was strong.
Was it a fast finish? Hell no. Was it a hard-fought finish? Yes. Was it a strong finish? Hell yes. The amount of both physical and emotional strength that takes you to the finish line in a marathon can’t be understated. For Rocket City, I had to lean into the emotional strength more than I would have thought but it makes the finish even sweeter. My last .2 miles were at a 13:30 minute per mile pace, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever done that little chunk of distance in a marathon finish.
As I rounded the corner into the VBC, they announced my name and that I was from “Tallahassee, Florida” (oops, forgot to update my race registration after I moved). That got a “Go Noles!” from the announcer, I did a Chop after I crossed, and got my medal and space blanket from some lovely volunteers right away. I got my finisher’s gloves and then made my way back to the food section. Thankfully, they had bags here that I could throw some of my own items and my chosen snacks into. Again, a BOTP problem, but all the pizza was gone by the time I got there. Bummer.
I hobbled out the door, down the STAIRS (who DOES that??), across the park, and back into the parking garage where I had left my car that morning. I carefully slid myself in, plugged in the address of my AirBNB, and gave my mom a call as I headed back. Along the way, I stopped at McDonald’s and got myself something to eat for later and the large Coke that I had been craving for hours.
All in all, I finished in 6:45:30. That’s faster than Little Rock 2020, Louisiana 2020, OR Mississippi Gulf Coast 2019, and the fastest I’ve finished a marathon since Oklahoma City in 2018. I’m proud of myself for getting across both lines upright and with forward progress, and I’m excited to see where my marathon training takes me in 2023.
It's Me, Tory D 