By Alec Denes, MD Sports Orthopedic Surgeon

I just returned to Portland from running the Austin Marathon this past Sunday, in my new personal best marathon time of 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 41 seconds. It was a beautiful day for a race, overcast and around 50 degrees at the 7 a.m. start, becoming sunny and reaching the mid-60s by about 9 o’clock. We fought a slight headwind for miles 3 to 17, but the hilly loop course positioned us to enjoy that wind at our backs down the home stretch. I had a very strong first half, but the wind and the miles started to chip away at me little by little. I still felt good until around mile 22, when my hamstrings started to tighten up. This should have been a fast downhill section, but I simply couldn’t get my legs to turnover fast enough. Knowing there were hills to come in the final 2 miles, I backed off to a more comfortable pace, and suffered through to the final thousand meters. I managed to burst into a closing sprint through the winding downhill final stretch, and crossed the finish line in 36 th place.

This one was absolutely monumental for me, and I’m still trying to mentally process the significance of this result. First of all, this is the first time I’ve finished a marathon in under 3 hours, despite having tried to do exactly that on two previous occasions. The world record for the marathon distance of 26.2 miles is around 2 hours, 4 minutes. This distance has never been run in less than 2 hours. I like to just round off the numbers and say that the fastest men in the world can run a marathon in 2 hours, and change. And now that I’m a sub-3-hour marathoner, I’m within an hour of those elite guys. Never mind the fact that shaving forty or fifty minutes off a marathon time means running a pace that’s an impossible minute and a half faster for every single mile. It sort of feels like I’m close, and that’s all that matters.

Secondly, my time in this race was a full 14 minutes faster than my previous best, almost 30 seconds faster for each mile. That kind of improvement required training, and a much larger commitment than I had made previously. I ran track workouts almost every week for 4 months, in wind and rain, even stomping out footprints in a half-inch of fresh snow doing mile repeats the week before the race. My tempo runs took me through neighborhood streets and around Nike headquarters, running at race pace, often at night or in the pre-dawn, wrapped in reflective gear like a construction crew. I planned long runs around Portland’s westside suburbs, progressing up to a hilly 20-miler a few weeks before race-day. I even ran 15 on the morning of the big December blizzard, plowing through an icy headwind on the way home that made me wish for goggles. Add to that some hill repeats and cross-training days on the bike or cross-country skis, and it started to feel like a second job. So, as the miles went by during the race, and my watch kept showing consistent splits, I drew strength from those long and lonely days of training, from thoughts of patients suffering through their injuries, from memories of late relatives and their struggles with illness, and from the random music in my head. My feet were light, my resolve strong, and I achieved my goal.