Boston Marathon 2014: More Is Less

What: Boston Marathon 2014.
When: April 21, 2014.
Time: 3:07:28. I dropped out at mile 14 (was on pace for 2:47) and jogged to finish.

There had to be a moment where I stop running four marathons a year and beating personal records at every single one, and this moment is now. I dropped out from Boston  I had a conservative start (the first infamously downhill mile I ran in ~6:30) and just relaxed till mile 5. At miles 11-12 I started feeling hot and having difficulty breathing and running. At mile 14 I realized that my goal goes out of the window and decided to not push it. Although the temperatures were in mid-60s, I had skin burns on my right side, which was consistently exposed to the sun. So heat/open sun, inadequate nutrition (I ate a huge seafood calzone the day before and a ton of food on race morning), and my cumulative fatigue must have determined this race for me. Thus, more marathons is less spectacular results.

Mileage for the 22 weeks of this season including recovery from CIM and the race week.
15 weeks were training for Boston.

Good aspects of the Spring'14 season: 

• Used Jack Daniel's marathon training plan A (4, 3, 6, 3 weeks respectively in each part). It put a lot of emphasis on tempo and long marathon pace running. As a result, ran a 1:17 half in Virginia Beach. 
• Reduced mileage, peaking at 80 mpw instead of 90 like the season before.
• Figured out exercises (bands and stability) for hip and core to reduce my knee pronation.
• Stopped using stability control shoes, thus allowing a wider range of cheaper options.

Improvements needed: 

• My quads are usually a weak point, and Boston hills ripped them apart. 
• My annoying left hamstring has a habit of tightening mid-race. 
• I still haven't figured out proper nutrition for longer races. I either too much or just wrong stuff and end up bloated. 
• Perhaps too little interval training. By the moment of the marathon, I haven't done intervals for two months. 

I wrote my goal splits and marginal paces for 2:45 to not be too anxious... didn't help. 

A note on the Boston marathon strategy: ideally, goal mile splits are a combination of (i) a personal effort profile (even effort, negative split, ...) and (ii) elevation profile. It's weird for someone who drops out to talk about race strategy, so I defer to the following two websites: Boston racing strategy and Boston pace calculator. Here's a convenient video with a map, course photos, and elevation combined:

I plan to redeem myself in the Amsterdam marathon in October 2014. Meanwhile, I'm chilling out in shorter distances. In the remainder of this post, I'll make sense of Boston as a category of being and diss some school campuses from the area.

Boston

From a bird's eye view, Boston is a sea of people on the marathon weekend.

Central Boston is packed.

Most people are like pigeons: they move chaotically, litter, and flock around sites of interest.

Financial district. The John Hancock tower in the center.
John Hancock Insurance is the primary sponsor of the Boston marathon.

South Boston.

West and North End. 

The Charles river separates Boston from Cambridge, producing massive amounts of traffic congestion and frustration.

View on the Prudential Tower from across the Charles river.

View from the Prudential Tower on the Charles river.

Same.

Boston came across as very busy and crowded. So, more people is less relaxation.

View on the river: breezy and fresh.

View towards the marathon course: sunny and hot. 

However, from a pedestrian/pigeon point of view, Boston is fun to waddle around. It has all sorts of eye candy:

• Narrow streets, reminiscent of the Old World. 

• Oldschool red brick buildings.

• Street art.

Expectation: cute street art.

Reality: cute street art surrounded by pigeons.

Must be hard to be a hater of running in Boston.

Some street roleplayers.

• Nasty local businesses.

We didn't go in, hoping to transfer sexual drive to competitive energy. 

• Historic sites, in demand among culturally-aware pigeons.

The bunker hill monument.
A climbing pass to it costs $25.

• Sea-fronts -- good to fight the heat. 

• Other megalopolis stuff. 

The John Hancock tower again, from down-up.

Downtown.

Boston Custom House tower.
Not too tall, but memorable. 

Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, constructed relatively recently, in 1997.

One very popular place is Boston Common -- a central park half-mile away from the marathon finish line, where many runners go to get their devastated bodies back together.

Top-down view on Boston Common. 

Mid-park the day before the race.

The MA state capitol is near the park. 

We were surprised to see a large pot party in the middle of the Common, while weed is still outlawed in MA. Gay marriage is allowed though.

Hipster pigeons. 

Keeping the bird theme open, the best part about the Common is a large flock of ducks and geese. Feeding them stale bagels was +Michelle Corkum's highlight of the trip. 

Synergy of species.

Why do ducks and geese hill together?

"I'm a goose, and I'm going to hurt you."

A commemoration sculpture of Make Way for Ducklings.

So, more touristy stuff is less rest before race. Overall, Boston is probably cool to live in, but could benefit from fewer people and wider+wiser streets.

Boston Marathon Expo

The expo was totally just a projection of the whole city on a single building.

Pigeoning at its best.

$110 for a jacket. That's $50 for a t-shirt. 

Running celebrities had their personal mini-crowds, further jamming up the expo.

Kara Goucher and random pigeons.

Ryan Hall and random pigeons.
The amount of hysteria around him explains his fail.

The finish line is located near the expo, so everyone goes to take a picture.

Boylston street closed for several days prior to the race.

The finish line.

One noteworthy thing at the expo was a set of creepy running figures:

Now, to university campuses. Driving to Boston and back to Pittsburgh, we had an opportunity to stop by MIT, Harvard, Yale, Penn State, and Bucknell.

MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus is located on the other side of the Charles river, in Cambridge MA.

View on the MIT campus. 

It is located on the border of some industrial zone, which pertains to a technological university.

MIT has a fair amount of artsy buildings and sculptures.

Bikes are ubiquitous in Boston. 

Reminiscent of Star Wars.

Weird. Must be restrooms.

MIT's Alchemist. 

But then MIT has a classical part too.

I like how the styles are combined in this campus. What I didn't like is the organization of space: it feels fragmented with the traffic going through it, and it doesn't make an impression of a single campus.

Harvard

Harvard boasts architectural diversity similar to MIT.

But unlike MIT, Harvard does a much better job at cohesively organizing the campus space. Its inner areas are enclosed from several sides and don't have traffic passing through them:

Traffic goes into a tunnel below the campus.

Yale

Yale has an urban campus in the middle of New Haven's downtown. Unfortunately, we arrived to Yale late at night, so we didn't see much.

The only thing we caught was a meeting of ethnic minorities, apparently happening throughout the Ivy League and their friends.

Naturally, we didn't come in.

The Yale Hindi debate, as seen by a discriminated outsider.

Penn State

I finally got to visit much-spoken-of Penn State University. Situated in the middle of the state, it is disconnected from the civilization. The impressive part was the size of its campus and the sports facilities.

An ice arena.

Star Wars again? 

Explicit sports propaganda on campus.

On the other hand, I found the academic buildings and dorms of Penn State depressingly boring.

Bucknell 

Bucknell is a random small school in central PA. Its campus had nothing unusual -- just lots of red brick.

We stopped by on parents' weekend, hence many cars.

Bucknell's track is really good: quality material and multi-colored lanes, and a gigantic flower-bed "Bucknell."

The most memorable part of the Bucknell campus is an outrageous number of urinals:

More urinals is less what?

--
This sums up the Boston trip: plenty of cool things, but more is less.

Update: the soundtrack of the trip is Funkytown by Lipps Inc.