If you haven't watched the Boston Marathon yet and plan to, stop reading now. Just thought I'd share my excitement after watching two consecutive days of great marathoning. Here are a few brief thoughts on London and Boston:
London Women: Mary Keitany is a freakin' stud. 2hr 19'19". Ridiculous.
London Men: Mutai ran 28:44 from 30km to 40km. That's good, right?
Boston Women: Was Kim Smith one wonky calf away from going wire-to-wire today? Maybe she would have been caught regardless, but damn she looked strong. Terrible luck. I found myself yelling at the TV as Desiree Davila (who?) almost took the win. The epitome of "bitter-sweet".
Boston Men: I know they had a tailwind, I know the course is net downhill, but 2:03:02 is still absolutely ridiculous. So is 2:03:06, for that matter, and the 2:04:5x from Gebre and Hall.
Do Al Trautwig and Larry Rawson make anyone else's ears bleed?
DGant,
ReplyDeleteCrazy weekend of marathoning indeed. But, I couldn't figure out for the life of me where to watch Boston today (on the computer), where was it on the TV? (gotta figure out how to work one of those things!)
Hall's a maniac, to have the confidence to run like that after such a poor last 8months or so is incredible.
I can't believe they ran that fast in Boston without pacemakers. Makes London seem sort of lame....
I'm going back to CIM and asking for a big tailwind :)
Boston was on TSN, channel 23 on cable. I've got it PVRed, if you're really keen to see it. I'd say that Hall pretty much acted as a pace setter for the men, he went to the front right away and only really got dropped once Mutai started doing his thing. I reckon he could do shit-all for 3 months, run Boston and still finish 4th.
ReplyDeleteWomen's finish was terrific, Davila and Kilel through surge after surge at each other, and both looked totally spent at the line.
Let's put this into perspective for the common folk who peruse this blog. If my math is semi-correct, 2:03:02 is 2:55/km which means this Mutai fellow ran 211 200m repeats in 35 seconds each...without any rest. Um, this is pretty good.
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