New Orleans Marathon

Amber, her parents and I went down to New Orleans this past week for a nice vacation as well as to run the Rock and Roll Marathon. We flew in Thursday, explored the city for the weekend and ran the race Sunday and flew home Monday. It was the perfect amount of time to be in New Orleans-we experienced Bourbon St, took a Steamboat ride on the Mississippi River, played some slots at Harrah's, drove across a 24 mile long bridge, stood at the site of the War of 1812's last battle, and ate a lot of food(crawfish, turtle soup, beignets, po boys, jumbolia, gumbo, shrimp...). Needless to say, between the half marathon the week before and all the food we ate and amount of walking we did, we weren't expecting stellar race times. Therefore, when Amber shattered her marathon PR by 13 minutes and I sped to a 10 minute PR we were both pleased.
I went into the marathon thinking that it would be great to beat the Ocean Drive marathon where I ran a 3:01 after stopping at my hotel to drop off my shirt and spending the night prior at Atlantic City. I took off at a conservative 6:50 pace soon realizing that I was feeling great and soon picked up the pace. I ran the first half marathon in 1:25:35 only slowing 20 seconds over the second thirteen miles to end up with a 2:51:36. I was so happy with my pace per mile that I was nervous about being "greedy" and trying to push the pace and then crash so I maintained that comfortably, fast pace throughout the race. Unfortunately, had I known I was only 1:36 away from getting into the 2:40's, I definitely would have tried to speed things up. Either way, I came in 24th overall in a field of 3,500 finishers and PR'd so I'm pretty happy.

Amber ran another solidly conservative race, finishing 9th woman overall and 83rd overall with a time of 3:03:48. A miscue by her GPS watch may have been the reason why she didn't break 3 hours as she finished the race at the requisite 6:56 pace but the distance the GPS had was 26.6... Despite not getting her goal of break the three hour mark, she looked really strong coming into the finish and should be tapering for this coming weekend USSSA's Snowshoe Nationals in Syracuse anyway.