Not so lucky #7: Los Angeles

The Asics LA Marathon was my 7th since October 2011, and the 3rd of 2013 (also the 4th in 14 months). With the SF Marathon coming up in July, the race offered an unexpected opportunity to relive many past marathon experiences. Shifting through the wreckage and examining the black box from LA may be key to successful race strategies in the future.

The decision to run LA had nothing to do with running a PR or a BQ. On only one occasion, October's Mohawk-Hudson River Marathon (MHRM), was picking a fast race course a significant factor in choosing a race (although I expected the streets of Cleveland in May to be suitable to running fast). Improving by +11 min on my 3:21 marathon PR to qualify for Boston sounds easier than the reality of needing to shave off 25 sec/mile for 26.2 miles. The real driving force was to complete the LA/SF Challenge by running both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Marathons in the same calendar year. Unfortunately, shortly after registering and making travel plans, the Challenge was put on hiatus by the new LA Marathon organizers. At first glance, LA did not look like a PR course, but I committed to training harder than ever.

Los Angeles bills the race as the "Stadium to the Sea," and as the tagline suggests the course is point-to-point from Dodgers Stadium to the Santa Monica pier. I am a fan of point-to-point races simply because they are usually designed to be running tours as opposed to some marathons that are add-ons to (more popular) half marathons. In those cases, both races cover all the interesting sights in 13.1 miles and leave the marathoners a 2nd half full of monotonous nothing. Both the Redding Marathon and the MHRM are point-to-point as well. Each race running primarily along riverside bicycle paths. Redding sights include the Shasta Dam, the Sundial Bridge and Northern California's glorious Sacramento River Valley, hence the tagline "26.2 With a View." The MHRM follows the Hudson River and is highlighted by the arrival of fall foliage. Certainly LA rivals both Redding and MHRM, albeit nature is traded for an urban landscape (and a lot of billboards for TV shows and movies I did not know existed). The crowd support and volunteers were great. Taiko drummers pounded out the beat as we climbed the hill through Little Tokyo. With a personalized bib, complete strangers often cheered me by name – a nice feature since this was a solo trip. There was a noticeable lack of spectators in the approach to and after the finish line. A clear indication of increased security measures following the Boston Marathon bombing.

The main reason LA didn't look like a PR course was the elevation gain of approximately 772 ft (~30 ft/mile). At worst this is a moderately lumpy course since hills generally do not intimidate me. The flattest road runs I can cobble to together from my front door average 40 ft/mile, and typical routes are 50–80 ft/mile. I have several favorite loops with 10+ miles at 100 ft/mile, and sustained climbs over a mile. Nevertheless, hills will cause some slowing in a race. An "average" marathon seems to be 500 ft of climbing (~20 ft/mile). Anything significantly less than that would be tagged a "flat, fast course," and if a course exceeds 1000 ft (~40 ft/mile) it approaches "challenging" territory. Nevertheless, I had experience on a course with a similar hill profile in Newport, RI. In addition to the hills I had managed to power through high winds, 15-25 mph sustained and 30+ mph gusts, so a good performance in LA seemed reasonable.
The second key feature of LA was an overall elevation drop from the start to the finish of over 400 ft. My PR at the MHRM also featured a nearly 400 ft drop from the start to the finish. Despite training to acclimate to downhill running, such courses are usually hard on my quads. While I pushed through the discomfort at the MHRM, the Redding Marathon starts with a >500 ft decent over less than 1 1/2 miles.


The Redding experience was humbling and the first marathon with any walking since my first attempt to cover the distance. It took well over a week for my legs to recover. Even walking was a comical sight for over 3 days. I did miss one long training run in the weeks prior to Redding and suffered from a cranky piriformis, but what this race really taught me was that running downhill is way harder than intuition would suggest. Plus, the overall downhill running is a combination of the point-to-point drop and the decents after the climbs. So Redding had a total of 1455 ft of decent and MHRM less than half of that (~650 ft). By comparison, LA with about 1280 ft of decent is closer Redding than the MHRM. I felt my quads starting to burn around 30 km, but never really felt like this was a major impediment to running. The little hills around 20 miles were certainly punishing, but paled in comparison to what really cause me to crack on my approach to Santa Monica.

I don't like heat. Double that distaste when it comes to humidity. Despite my best efforts, heat has always been my Achilles heel. I ran the 15 mile Charleston Distance run on Labor Day weekend 2012 in +80% humidity and temps between the mid-70s and 80s (fortunately it was overcast). It sucked. I ran the first 6.5 mile loop of the Big George Half IronMan on target for a respectable 1:45 minute half marathon split before wilting in the high humidity and temps in the 70s to finish the run in just under 2 hours. The forecast for LA on marathon day was for highs in the 70s to low 80s. I reasoned that the humidity was low (true) and that the sea breeze as we approached the Pacific would keep things reasonably comfortable (not so much). I remember glancing up at the sky around mile 15, noticing it was overcast and commenting to a fellow runner how lucky we were that the sun was staying behind the clouds (big mistake). A short time later, the sun burned off the cloud cover and things started to unravel. I watched the marathon coverage on TV later and the commentator stated that the "feels like" temperature increased by 15 degrees when the sun comes out. I've never heard that factoid so he might have just made that number upon the spot. I'm going to assume it is true because I got hot. Really hot.

This was an unwanted repeat of the Cleveland Marathon in the spring. The difference between Cleveland and LA was the humidity. I knew from the start that Cleveland was going to suck, and for some reason, I still tried to run hard. At the halfway point, I contemplated ditching the 2nd half. On the long stretch of unprotected city street in the blazing sun around mile 17, I cursed myself for having chosen to run the second half of the race. Over 140 runners were treated for heat-related issues, and I had seen many of them collapsed by the road.
In contrast, the onset suffering in LA was almost instantaneous. One minute, I felt great and the next, not so much. The sun came out in full force about the time the last hills popped up on the horizon. My internal governor forced a walk to cool down and doing so was no favor for my fatiguing quads. After a short break, I tried to get going again but started overheating almost immediately. It was not until the last couple miles downhill to the finish that a sustained effort was possible. Over 90 runners were treated by medical in LA. For contrast, over 21,000 people finished the LA Marathon compared to less than 2,300 in Cleveland.

I ran 481 miles in the 12 weeks prior to race week in LA (along with regular cycling and swimming for cross-training). I ran 359 miles in the 12 weeks prior to Cleveland, which is close to the average 350 miles of training for any other race. Nearly 500 miles and almost 150 miles more than usual. It turns out approaching 500 miles of training won't necessarily prepare you for tough race day conditions. Even more so if those miles were run at an average of 21 °F. I made that up, however, it was a brutally cold winter and I ran every mile outside. The only reprieve was a week running along Ventura Beach when I went to a conference in January.