Sharon McNary's  e-Mail to the Ten30Pace Group

 

 Sharon McNary is a long-time member of the LA Leggers and has served for many years as a mentor for the Ten30Pace group, a group of runners training to run the Los Angeles Marathon at a pace of 10 minutes 30 seconds per mile.  She got so good at pacing that she was recruited by Clif Bars to lead pace group at various marathons through out the USA.  Sharon leads groups to finish in either 5:00 or 5:30.  At this year's Las Vegas marathon she paced the 5:30 group.  From time to during the running of this marathon I found I was running with Sharon and her group.  She and I passed over the half marathon timing pads at the same time.   This is her report to the LA Legger Ten30Pace group.

Also read my report to the Clif Bars about Sharon's pacing. 

From: ten30Leggers@yahoogroups.com [mailto:ten30Leggers@yahoogroups.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 8:49 PM
To: ten30Leggers@yahoogroups.com; ten30pace@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ten30Leggers] Sharon 's Las Vegas Marathon race report

 

Hello ten30pacers from Sharon McNary --

 

Sunday I paced the 5:30 marathoners at the New Las Vegas Marathon. No suspense, I hit my time, running the race in 5:28:51, well within the "two minutes under goal" window for the Clif Bar Marathon Pace Team. 

I had a huge, wonderful group of people who stuck with me in larger numbers longer than any previous group. I think a lot of them were there for protection against the 20 mph occasionally gusting winds. We did two walk breaks per mile, which helped people stay with the group.

I saw Charles Sayles running his 77th marathon, Albert Shum running his 26th marathon of 2006, ten30pacer Angie, and several other Leggers. My pace group started rather small but soon grew to at least 75 to 100 in my pace group. At mile 25.5 I sent most of them ahead, so I know many of them finished well under my time.

How I got to the finish, however, taught me some good lessons about running and pacing marathons. I could whine, but I prefer to take away these intensely personal lessons that you needn't adopt for yourself (you might not like tuna or slot machines) but here they are:

Les son 1: PMS (aka Pre-Marathon Syndrome) -- If you're sick on and off for the month before the marathon, don't panic. Just try every over-the-counter drug that any work colleague recommends in search of the cure. Mucinex was my secret weapon this weekend and I ran feeling pretty good.

Les son 2: Vegas, Baby! -- Don't spend so much time gambling at the slot machines that you forget to drink your carbo-load calories and tuna-load the afternoon before the marathon. I did a 3-mile run with the pace team at 6:15 a.m., met them at the buffet for an enormous breakfast, talked myself hoarse meeting runners at the Clif expo booth from 9 a.m. to noon, then played slots until it was time for our team dinner at 5:30 p.m.  I didn't even make it back to my room all day. The running Elvii had taken up all the space at the buffet so we didn't eat until nearly 7 p.m. I ate all the wrong things -- rich shrimp and crab with cocktail sauce, poached salmon, rich mashed potatoes with gravy, vanilla custard ice cream with chocolate sauce. And I paid for all that richness and fat with four pit stops during the race. After each stop, I had to race to catch up with my group.

Les son 3: Some race directors care more about a cool start-line photo than the runners in the race -- Race directors forget that only about the first thousand people in the starting blocks can actually see the entertainment and hear the announcements. Blue Man Group performed the Star (Start?) Spangled Banner but did the race director manage to get a video hookup to the giant video screen that towered over the Mandalay Bay Resort starting line? Noooo, he did not. The 17,000 of us in the back of the starting line bus saw the fireworks, but little else.

Les son 4: Race directors offer perks to local runners that make no sense whatsoever. -- Get this. The starting lineup was the four elite men runners. (The two elite women runners got a head start in a challenge to finish first and collect $65,000.) After the elite men were the 75 Elvis runners and women dressed as showgirls. Then came several hundred members (fast, slow, walkers, stroller-pushers, whatever) of the Las Vegas Roadrunners, the official training group of the race company, Devine Sports and sister group to the L.A. Roadrunners. Behind them was the sub-four-hour runners corral, then the general corral for everybody else. This meant that legitimately fast runners in the sub-four corral had to zig and zag around people of far lesser abilities, endangering both fast and slow.

Les son 5: You can't squeeze five lanes of people traffic through a needle -- That's what happened at the start. A very wide field of runners were funneled down to a few lanes to get through the canopy marking the start. But the electronic timing mats were placed well ahead of the canopy. I was expecting to start my watch at the canopy, I heard the mats beeping before I got there, but I was still expecting a mat at the canopy. As a result, my watch was off by about 20 seconds because I started it late. Normally that's not enough to matter, but if you're going for a Boston qualifying time or pacing a group, you need to be accurate.

Les son 6: Don't ask a marathon to deliver a course personality that is different from its city personality -- Just like any tourist's arrival in Las Vegas ,  a marathon runner sees all glitz and showbiz and guys hoisting their beer bongs cheering from the sidewalks. I saw Ozzy Ozborne or a tribute artist who looked and sounded like him. But soon you're in the tacky low-rent section grateful for the curbside IHOP restaurant with available restroom stalls for my first pitstop, and then into industrial nowhereland, and roads lined with housing tract cinderblock walls.

Les son 7: A city's runners probably "work" there, too -- If the woman in the mara-thong and bikini top passes you, you're probably running the New Las Vegas Marathon. She ran surrounded by a crew of four Elvii and another "showgirl." I saw them waiting outside a porta-potty in mile 16, and they soon passed us again. Funny, yet creepy.

Les son 8: If the mile marker signs and race clocks are in the wrong places, even off by as much as a half-mile, don't panic --  Trust your pace. Believe me, there's no way I led my group in a 14-minute mile, because that would be mostly walking, or an 8-minute mile, because I can't even do that in Santa Monica . Just look for an alternative, like a fellow runner with a Garmin, or clues on the street. The correct mile markers were painted in fluorescent orange on the street next to orange-painted jugs of water that were visible for about 100 yards.

Les son 9: You know you're in a wonderful neighborhood when the churches on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. are closed, but the pastor and his wife wave at you from the door and the choir of ladies in black dresses and big hats sings gospel for you as you pass by.

Les son 10: If the race ends in your hotel parking lot, don't look for food because you've got better eats in your room -- If there was food at the end of this marathon, I've no idea where it was.

So, at the end of this pacing weekend, I got through the race, I hit my time, I took home lots (yes, finally LOTS!) more money than I pulled out of the ATM machine, and learned new lessons about running marathons.

I'll see you on Saturday at the Via Marina water station!

Sharon