Icebreaker Indoor Marathon 2011

This marathon was limited to 130 entrants. There were officially 105 finishers for the event. Rob and I left Saturday morning to drive to Milwaukee, WI. The drive was easy as a Saturday drive could be. The event had race day packet pick up and we were excited about not having to worry about finding the venue on the day before. We garnered some cheap lodging at the Motel 6 and enjoyed a dinner of PF Changs Chicken Lo Mein to load up glycogen reserves. The morning of the event we were very glad we weren't running outdoors as it was 4 degrees fahrenheit. We made it to the Pettit National Ice Center around 6:15 and went in to get our packets. With an 8 a.m. start we had time to relax, eat breakfast and walk around the indoor track to get familiar with the loop that we eventually would do 95.4 laps on. At 8 they started us and I managed to do a 4 minute run to 1 minute walk ratio for the entire event. I hit the 48 lap mark at 1:58:30 and I started to envision my second best time ever in a marathon event. That evaporated as the energy drained out of my legs over the next couple of hours. My glutes started to have some discomfort but I managed to finish strong. This event was interesting in the way that I saw Rob frequently throughout the event and had a chance to visit with various runners of different levels throughout the race. That is a very unique experience as the faster runners are usually way ahead of me. I was able to encourage Rob to finish strong knowing that I was getting closer to the end myself. After the race, I felt very nauseous and even went to the bathroom thinking I was going to throw up, but I never did. We had originally planned on driving back after the race, but we were both not feeling well and we went back to the Motel 6 and got a room for another night