Five hours was optimistic.
Yesterday I said I wanted to run around five hours. I missed that goal by 37 minutes and 50 seconds. I still got through the marathon.
The 2006 result has me 74th out of 238 finishers. Age 22. Boulder, Colorado. The winner ran 3:41:04. Seventh place was 4:17:57. My pre-race email was right about the front of the field and optimistic about me.
Leadville was not a normal road marathon. The course used mining roads and trails and climbed above 13,000 feet at Mosquito Pass. I had called it grueling before the start.
Training had been split between running and the bike. I rode to work some days and did longer rides after work, although I rarely went beyond fifty miles. The bike needed a tune-up. My running legs got the harder job this weekend.
Friday also had three Dice job inquiries. I was still running systems at SimAuthor, keeping Praxis alive on the side, and looking for the next network or Unix role. The applications went out before the race. Nothing about Saturday made the rest of that work disappear.
The Leadville Trail 100 was still floating around as a later-summer idea. This result did not answer that question. It did give me one real number instead of another plan: 5:37:50.
Seventy-three people finished ahead of me. More than a hundred finished behind me. I had aimed higher, but I was officially across the line.
The result sheet had 238 finishers on it. My line was number 74.