Long Beach Marathon 2016
By Alan S
By Alan S
Hello my fellow barefoot people,
I am relaxing with my feet up after a day of barefoot gardening thinking about my race last Sunday 10/9/2016.
I ran my second full barefoot marathon (first one was in May 2016). Its hard for me to even imagine that I am a marathoner and a barefoot marathoner as well. Just last year someone referred to me as the barefoot running guy and I thought it was weird I wasn't super accepting of the term. It bugged me more that I wasn't accepting the title as much as I felt a new responsibility of carrying that title. So now, I am both happy to carry the title as well as be an ambassador for barefoot runner. Maybe completing a few races running barefoot has changed me. So, I ran the Long Beach Marathon. It was cool...
The Long Beach 1/2 as well as the full marathon are very barefoot able. I was not the only one running barefoot. Barefoot Alberto ran, I think his 100th marathon, and we said hello to each other. The first 4 miles are on the streets/ freeway connected to the port of LB, heavy truck use, and it is rough asphalt in poor repair. The next 4 are heavenly smooth along the shore front and bike path of the beach. The last bit is a mix of different road surfaces and qualities. I was pretty tender after 22 and stuck to the painted lines for help to the finish. This could have been because of the roughness of the roads and or my bit of under training on road surfaces past 20 miles, I ran sidewalks mostly after 18 in training runs.
I had a personal goal of under 4 hours (last marathon was 4:25). I paced with the 3:45 group up until mile 21 and just slowly faded off that pace, though not my intention, I just couldn't keep up. However, I finished at 3:56, which is my new personal record.
My next run will be the Catalina ECO marathon, which is a mostly trail race. I'll be either running it in my VibramFFS or my Luna sandals, I have yet to hit long trail runs to help me decide.
Alan
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