DNF are the letters I am referring to of course (Did Not Finish). I had several races in the past that I’ve come close to not finishing, but struggled on to avoid seeing those letters by my name. This weekend was the first marathon that I voluntarily pulled myself out. One of the most difficult decisions I have ever made in the running arena.

The race was the Wyoming marathon just outside Laramie. The course is pretty unforgiving, but that isn’t the reason for my troubles. My legs felt fine and I felt strong. I’ve had problems in priors races with the GI track. Normally I get stomach pains in the latter stages of the race and I’m able to push through them to the finish line. Wyoming was different with all the pains starting at mile 5. I walked/ran the next 4-5 miles to the next aid station to officially withdraw myself from the race (the aid stations were minimal in this particular race). 

Those 4-5 miles were extremely difficult as I tried to justify staying with it, but the pain was too great. The hard part was waiting at the aid station for about 45 mins waiting for an available ride back to the finish line area. While waiting, I saw several people I was running with come back through after hitting the turn-around about 4 miles down the road. So as I sat there, I watched people come through thinking, “I would be right there if I just toughed it out!” 

I eventually got back to the finish area to turn in my number for accountability purposes. As I walked around the area, my stomach reassured me that I did the right think because the simple act of walking briskly, hurt pretty bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not happy about what happened which is probably why I’m up late writing about it.

I am trying to figure out what went wrong, but really its not worth analyzing because I did several things out of the norm for this race which all likely attributed to it. Everything from the altitude, food, and mental state.

I have always preached that running all these races is about the experience more than a time or an overall placement or age group placement. I hope that I can use this experience to grow as a runner for other races. It is very difficult to come off a bad race and this isn’t my first bad race. The plus side is, I have no where to go but up from this one unless I DNF again which I came so close to doing at last year’s DMTM which is my next race here in a couple weeks.

If anyone has any words of wisdom, please share…..

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.