Faster than Buck Wheat: A Duke City Marathon Race Report

This weekend was the 30^th anniversary of the Duke City Marathon right here in Albuquerque New Mexico.  I’ve run Duke City once before and, I guess because it’s mostly on a bike path that I have literally logged thousands of miles on, I don’t find it particularly inspiring.  However, since it was the 30^th anniversary, which is pretty cool and something to celebrate, the GeekGrl has never run the full marathon but has been dying to run if for maybe the past four years though something always happens to derail her plans.

This weekend was supposed to be a Drill weekend with the Army Guard but we were told there was no money and so no Drill.  As soon as I found out I wouldn’t be at Drill I asked the GeekGrl if she wanted to run and, well, her answer is pretty obvious by this point.

Considering I just did a 34 mile ultra last weekend and a 12 mile mountain run the weekend before I probably should have just taken it easy this weekend but I’ve really been on a roll with my training over the past four weeks for the first time this year and I have finally started to drop a bit of weight so instead I decided to throw in Duke City and train right through the Marine Corps Marathon, just go there and enjoy the race and not worry about time.  My plan moving forward is to back off in November, taper for the Honolulu Marathon and see what I can achieve there.  My only concern for that race is that it might be too warm to do really well but I guess that’s something I’ll discover on race day.

Anyway, given that I’m training straight through I decided to run this fairly easy as a long-supported training run but a marathon is still a marathon so it was still kind of tough to run easy.  I was averaging 8:30 minute miles out to the half-way point and feeling good but on the return I felt like I needed to back off and so dropped my pace down to 8:45 and eventually to 9s and the last couple miles were low 10s.  I ended up finishing in 3:55:02 and still feeling pretty good but ready to stop running.  Today, the day after the race, I took off running as planned but I was able to get right back to Olympic Weightlifting and knocked out several sets of squats and split squats.

The other thing I did the day after the race was look up the official race results.  As I was looking at my age group results I noticed a guy with the name “Buck Wheat.”  I ended up beating Buck Wheat by 12 minutes so now I know, I am faster than Buckwheat.