This post will be the second in a series describing my brief trip to Colombia to compete as an invited elite athlete in the Media Maratón de Flores in Medellín, and a short two days in Cartagena on the coast. Click here to read Part I and stay tuned for the next edition!
My alarm rings at 4am and my eyes burst open with the uniquely familiar feeling of drowsiness quickly vanquished by adrenaline. As usual, night-time still firmly holds captive the black sky outside my window and it takes me a second to recognize my surroundings – a Best Western in Indiana? A Comfort Suites in Princeton? No – I’m still in Fabricio’s dark guest room in Medellin, Colombia. After stumbling around and groping the wall, I find the light switch and assure my body that this is not a bathroom break; this is the real deal.
I leave the brightly lit bedroom and plunge back into darkness. In the kitchen I find a mug, some hot water, and my life-blood – a morning cup of coffee. Back in my room, I sip the murky liquid and munch down a small peanut-butter sandwich. I have a little over an hour until I’m planning to leave at this point, so I try my best to just relax.
Dawn is just breaking as I do my last check – singlet, shoes, a couple of Colombian pesos which I tuck into my shorts and shoe. Okay, let’s go.
An early morning cup of coffee does the trick
The elevator carries me thirteen lucky floors down to the open-air entryway where the city is moaning and groaning out of its own slumber. Fabri had given me (particularly vague) directions to the metro, which he told me I’d be able to take up to the starting line. I’m not super confident in the city yet, so I ask the guard at the front of the complex. As he begins to explain, I see man walk up – similarly clad in short-shorts and running shoes.
“Te vas a la maratón?” he asks, eyeing my own singlet and shoes. Are you going to the marathon?
I answer and he tells me he too is heading to the metro, and the two of us are off.
The morning is cool and cloudy, a distinct deviation from the hot, bright sun of my arrival the day before; the runner in me smiles at the now near-perfect conditions. The walk is much farther and more complicated than I’d expected, as we cross a major highway and scoot under an overpass before finally scaling a set of steep stairs up to the Aguacatala metro station. I’m glad I have my new guide.
Dawn breaking as I leave the house
Andrés, who has sheoparded me thus far, is also running the media maratón – half-marathon – as he did last year, and gives me the low-down on the course. Like many of the South American races I’ve run, the course is plagued with several significant climbs.
“Claro, es bien fuerte,” he says. It’s a toughy.
Having trained and raced solely at high altitude, I lack the usual benchmarks of my training that I would recognize at sea level. Like my race the week before, I really have no idea what to expect. Hearing that the course will be yet another challenge, I file the thought in the back of my mind, along with the other nagging reasons that this could go terribly wrong. Accustomed to dealing with these pre-race jitters, I just smile and shake my legs out as our metro pulls up and Andrés and I step on, following suit with a billion other neon-clad marathoners-to-be.
We follow the day-glo tide from the metro to the starting area, where brightly clad Colombians are packed like sardines as they’re led through a series of goofy-looking callisthenic warm-ups. At this point, Andrés points me towards the start line and we part ways, as I thank him for guiding me this far and give “friendly Colombia” another point in my mind. He hangs back with the undulating crowd and I jog over to begin my warm-up.
I jog through the chaotic throngs around the zona de calintamiento – warm-up zone – until I finally find the giant starting corrals. I’m hoping to jog the first couple miles of the course, but everything is already closed off and I’m quickly and condescendingly pointed back towards the zona de calintamiento. I explain that I’m an elite – an invited American – and the same man who’d been shouting at me to get off the course smiles and brings me to a small, cordoned-off courtyard.
The woman standing watch at the gate looks at my 5-digit bib number as if I’m a first grader trying to pass off a fake ID. She smiles and explains that, no, sweetie, this is just for elites.
“But I am an elite,” I explain. “I’m an invited international athlete!”
She checks her list and, sure enough, there I was – Tyler Andrés Andrews, Estados Unidos, supposedly bib #9.
Immediately, her affect changes and she apologizes for the mix-up, blaming the chaotic registration and ushers me into the courtyard, her inner friendly-Colombian coming out as she smiles and introduces me to the rest of the staff.
As I jog around, warming my legs up on the comfortably chilly morning, I look to my left, to my right, over my shoulder, to scope out the competition. A small gaggle of Kenyans in bright red Fila track suits seems to garner the most attention – both from me and the others – but there are plenty of South American guys with the long, slender calves and sunken, gaunt faces of professional marathoners that are not unintimidating.
Tyler enjoying a beautiful Colombian day after the race.
Before we know it, whistles are sounding, calling us to battle and we’re herded into the elite starting corral. As we bounce and shake, trying to keep our perfectly warmed up bodies ready to shoot of the line, there’s still some confusion among the starters, as no-one seems to know whether we were in the right place – whether this was the right corral for men or women, for the 21k half-marathon or 42k marathon. Looking around, no one else seems too bothered, so I just try to go with the flow. Finally, the moment comes and we all crouch down, watching the starter for the gun.
Of course, the gun misfires, and no one really knows what to do. A few people stutter-step off the line and then looked around confused until the starter just waves us all on. And they’re off! (As an aside, about 5 seconds after starting, we hear the gun finally go off behind us.)
The front of the race is out fast. I’m usually aggressive off the line in road races, but there is a pack of maybe five or eight guys that are killing it in the first 400 meter. I can see the Kenyan contingent and some of the faster looking South Americans and I know I need to let them go. I fall into a secondary pack of guys, maybe about 15-20 in total, and tuck in near the front. We circumnavigate a rotary and then head uphill to the west for the first 4km of the race.
I see a sign for the first kilometer, which we pass in 3’21. Despite being at the faster end of my predicted race pace, I’m honestly a bit disappointed that it’s not faster given the quick start. Still, we are already running uphill and the next 2km are entirely uphill and fairly straight along a long, wide road.
At this point, the packs are starting to form, as the clowns who went out too hard are falling back. As we climb, I work hard to stay with the pack I’d fallen into and we pass 3km together in 10’11. I’m a bit nervous about going out this quick, especially uphill, but all I can see behind me is a giant empty space – the dreaded no-man’s-land. I figure I’ll just hold on as long as I can.
At about 4km, the course turns and heads downhill, back down toward the city center. It’s here, that our pack begins to disintegrate – splitting into little factions – so I try to use the downhill to really work and stick with the front. We pass 5km in 17’12, at which point the course flattens and follows a fairly constant rolling road along the river which bisects the city.
Right around or before 5km, someone in my pack turns on the gas. The pace heats up. A lot. Maybe the guys wanted to go through 5km faster, who knows. Either way, we’re not messin’ around anymore and it’s decision time. Do I hang back and risk running the rest of the race in no-man’s-land? Or do I just go for it?
I hang on. The next split I see is 8km (or 5 miles for my American readers), which we pass in 26’16. Doing some quick math in my head, I figure we had just covered 3km in 9’04 (about 4’50/mile pace). It’s hard to explain to a non-runner how absurdly fast that one segment was. This is a pace that I could only run for about 10km at sea level – and Medellin is yet another high-altitude Andean city. Honestly, I feel like I’m running a 10k, not 21km half-marathon, and I’m ready for the race to be over. I’m starting to get worried.
By 9km, our pack has thinned even more, as the men around me began to drop off from the insane early surge. To make things worse, we start to climb up a long, steady hill which hammers upward for an unrelenting 4km until just after the half-way mark. As I begin the long slog, I know it’s too late. This is the beginning of the end. And there’s so much more ground to cover…
Our pack thins more and more as we climb up into the smoggy heights of the city and then it happens. I’m getting dropped. By 12km, my legs are ready to stop. Maybe sit down, maybe a nice cool shower. By 13km at the top of the hill, it’s all I can do to keep going and use the brief downhill as recovery.
From there, the course rolls – sube y baja, up and down – all the way to the finish. I know I’m dying and dying hard, and I just try my best to hang on, to not lose too much time. Maybe for my benefit, the km markers are either non-existent or I just don’t see them, but it’s nice not to know how much I’m slowing down.
The last big climb snakes up from a park just after the 15km. At this point, I feel like I’m just about walking. Cresting the hill, I hear footsteps behind me, the first I’ve heard in a while, and two younger runners creep up on me. I actively decide to rally and really race them over these last 4km, to see if I can salvage something from this brutal second half. We head downhill from whence it’s a straight shot to the finish.
As they push the pace, coming up on my shoulder, I stay in front and won’t let them pass. My legs are giant, lead logs, but I will them to keep moving until I see a marker saying 2km to go. I actually throw in a little surge and gap my two competitors by a couple of meters at that point and think – Wow, I might actually be able to close well. But that dead, heavy-legged distress floods back shortly after that increased pace and the dreaded footsteps return.
Listening carefully, I can tell there’s only one pair of clip-clopping this time. We’d dropped the other. Coming around a bend, we enter a narrow, labyrinthian array of streets, lined with metal barriers and streamers. I figure we must be within 200 meters of the finish, so I start to kick and pull away again. We round a corner and I see more and more of these metal barriers, with no sign of the finish line. At this point, though, I’ve started kicking and – as Jon Waldron has said – I have to commit.
What I’d thought would be maybe 200 meters turns out to be more like 600 meters. By the time I finally round the final corner and see the finish line, I’m already rigging – my legs nothing more than jello. My competitor, who’d timed his kick better, flew by me as I muscled my way through to the finish. The time on the clock is in the 1’15s as I stagger by and I have no real idea of my place.
Ty with host Fabricio post-race
Several cups of orange Gatorade and a few bananas later, I’m back in my little courtyard, thinking about what went wrong. I had run slower than I thought I could and – thinking back to the intermediate splits – there’s no question in my mind that I killed any chance of a fast race with that too-quick 9’04 3k split in the first half. Still, at the time, I made the decision and I’m not sure I had too much of a choice. According to Daniel’s altitude conversion charts, the overall time is worth about 1’12 at sea level, but that 9’04 3km surge is worth 8’40 (!!) at sea level.
I read something recently that basically said, “To fail without learning from your mistakes is the only way to truly fail.” I think I’m lucky in that I’ve almost always learned from my races in which things go badly. In fact, I’ve probably learned much MORE from my races that go badly than my races when I crush it. One of the most important skills I’ve developed is how to bypass the immediate emotional reaction, the disappointment and sadness and anger and “argh-why-am-I-so-terrible?!” and look for the WHY. Maybe it’s my engineering mind that always wants to understand and have a logical explanation – as opposed to simply running into the bathroom and crying and sulking for the rest of the day. Maybe it’s just growing up. I think that could be called maturity.
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