Salt Lake City Marathon 2010

Written by Scott:

My brother Glenn had run 9 Marathons and had been talking about running the Salt Lake Marathon for some time. I figured it would be a good idea to run it with him considering I ran the Deseret News Marathon and was feeling that I could experience a better race. With 13 weeks until the Marathon I started my training.

I hadn't really been running since the last Marathon and I wasn't sure if the 13 weeks would be sufficient to feel prepared. The hardest part of the training was certainly the blistery cold weather. It wasn't too bad for short runs because I would just hop onto the treadmill in the basement turn on the Utah Jazz game and run 5 miles. My Saturday long runs were a different story. Most of them I was able to get outside and run in my cold weather gear but I didn't enjoy doing it when it was snowing. When my 18 mile run came along I woke up to a horrible storm of wet snow. I decided to go to Gold's Gym and attempt running 18 miles on a treadmill. Thank goodness for the Cardio Theater. I watched "Liar Liar" and "Over the Top". I did pretty good for the first 12 miles but the next 6 were awful...but...I did it.

By the week of the race I felt much more prepared for this Marathon then the last one.

Alicia was very nice to help me carbo load the week before the Marathon. Every meal consisted mostly of pasta. The night before the race we had a Pre-Marathon Spaghetti Dinner for everyone. Alicia and the kids all wore t-shirts that Alicia had made with my picture on them. They said "Salt Lake City Marathon 2010" and "Go Daddy, Go!".

5:45 am Glenn and I are anxiously awaiting our shuttle to the race.

The great part about the Salt Lake Marathon is it runs through a lot of my stomping grounds from when I was younger. For those of you who have followed our blog you might remember our old house was right at Mile 9. Every year I would set up a "un-official" water stand and cheer on the Marathoners. I never actually dreamed I would one day run it.Approx Mile 3.5 Mom and Dad were there to cheer us on and provided us a nice place to hand off our long sleeve shirts. In this section of the race I saw one of my favorite sites. For as far as I could see down the road it was just a herd of people running. It looked very cool. The half Marathon and the Marathon started at the same place and there were close to 6,000 people running both.

Around mile 5 the course split and it was amazing to see how many people were running the half compared to the full 26.2 miles. If I remember correctly just over 1000 actually ran the whole thing.

Mile 6ish - Greg Thornton and his family was cheering us on and handed us a bottle of powerade.

Mile 9- Brian, Annabelle and Clara were waiting by our old house to hand us some energy beans. Who knew they had caffeinated Jelly Belly's....very cool.

Mile 11- We saw Glenn's sister-in-law Vivian sitting on the course cheering.

13.1. We hit the half way point and we were feeling great. We were barely under the 2 hour mark I was excited to see Alicia and the girls in just one more mile.

Mile 14ish- No Alicia, no kids, but a woman from our church was there to offer us Otterpops (we both declined) and told us that Alicia had the van packed with all the kids and the battery was dead. She would try to see us at the finish line. This made me sad. I had really looked forward to seeing them but I mostly felt bad for Alicia. How frustrating this had to be for her.

Kids waiting to borrow our neighbors van so they could get to the race.

Mile 18.5- We are running and we hear someone yell "Scott...Glenn" There was Alicia and all the kids. She had just unloaded the kids and if she hadn't of looked up she would have missed us because we didn't see her at all. We stopped took a quick picture and continued.

Mile 21- I started feeling tired, hot and anxious for the next water stand. It was now hotter than any of my training runs and I didn't feel used to the draining effect of the sun. Of course it also could just be that running 21 miles happens to also take a lot out of you.

Mile 22ish- My left calf starts cramping up. This also happened in the last marathon and I wasn't looking forward to the next 4 miles. With every step I took my left calf would get a massive muscle cramp but fortunately it never locked up completely. I stopped probably 6-7 times to do a quick stretch. I am not sure why I cramp up like this. I felt I had been drinking enough water. With each step I was just wincing in pain and often I would shout out "AAAHHH". I tried altering my stride, making contact with different parts of my foot on the ground but nothing really seemed to help. I just figured I was going to deal with this the rest of the way.

24.5- No more cramping but I forgot that there was a four block assent of maybe 150 feet in elevation but it felt more like 500. What an awful place to have an uphill portion.

Mile 25- The home stretch. A slight down hill and I feel we picked up our pace back up now that I wasn't crampy any more.

We turned into the Gateway and I could see lots of people watching us come in. I started waving my hands up and down to cheer us on. This cheering made me feel we could push it. As we headed down the final block Glenn said, "Let's pass the lady in the pink". We started sprinting. We passed her and another person and hit the finish line.
Scott Buchanan Time- 4:06:52, Average pace- 9:25,
Glenn Buchanan Time- 4:06:52, Average pace- 9:25

Turns out we finished with the exact same time. Glenn of course can run much faster but stayed with me the whole time. He claims he couldn't have gone much faster because of the elevation change and having a cold. I know he is just being nice to his wee brother.

So I cut just over 11 minutes off of my Marathon time from 9 months prior. Even with the cramping I had a much better race. I wasn't crying and on the verge of passing out when I finished. Part of that is that I think it is just more emotional to finish your first one and we finished when it was 72 degrees instead of 94 like the first race. I felt good, I was glad it was over but I was frustrated with the cramping. Alicia said I looked much better after this one too.

Glenn and I talked about many things during our 4 hours of running. One of those was that I ran with him in his first race ever. The Ouelessebougou 5k. I was probably about 16 at the time. I would have never thought that one day we would run a race again. And never that it would be a Marathon. Thanks Glenn, I love you!