Mesa Marathon 2025 Race Report

Subtitle: Grateful for so much, but it still feels like ‘one that got away’.

It’s taken me a while to parse this race out in my mind.

Let’s face it, it is never as simple as the race, or the race day.

That is a moment in time.  A brief sliver in the years and months and weeks and days that led to the race.

Race day alone and out-of-context is like looking at a clam out of its shell.

Or maybe a shell without its clam.

As I get older, I tend to look at races in the context of my entire running life.  Which, of course, creates a lot of baggage for the poor race.

It also makes it unclear how to feel about my performance.

That’s a long way of saying I don’t know how to answer the basic question people are asking me, “How was the race?”

Because on the positive side I met many of my primary goals with this race:

• I managed my nutrition and healthy eating to show up well under my goal race weight – which isn’t the easiest thing to do during the winter months.
• I successfully got through a hard training cycle and showed up at the starting line healthy and race-worthy.
• I finished! Which cannot be understated as an achievement.
• I took 10 minutes off my last post-knee-injury finish from Napa in March.
• The aforementioned knee, while still weak and not 100%, is far better than where I started, and continued to strengthen through the training cycle – so no setbacks.
• I walked away from the race without any significant injuries.
• I managed this whole trip without my wife and I catching anything, even with a multiplicity of flus cavorting about the country.

But, on the not-so-good side of the ledger.

• I missed all my real time goals.
• I went out too fast and crashed.
• Regardless of my poor tactical execution, I don’t feel like I’m where I need to be to compete at the level I want in a road marathon.

So in my mind the answer is somewhere between ‘Meh’ and “I’m overwhelmingly happy to be getting up in the morning.”

Aye – there’s the rub.  Too much baggage.

…

This race, the Mesa marathon, has a lot going for it.  I’m glad I checked it out.

My wife and I flew down Friday morning and made our way over to the expo.  We picked up my stuff and Eric’s stuff.  The Expo was very busy, and the parking lot was jam-packed. When we first got there we couldn’t find a place to park so we gave up, went and had lunch and then came back.

I was surprised by how many runners there were.  In my head I thought it would be smaller.  Turns out close to 4,000 runners were in the marathon.  Because it’s a point-to-Point downhill race in February the race attracts a lot of Boston hopefuls and marathon maniacs and others.  It’s a good product in the right place on the calendar.

The expo was fine.  Expos aren’t really something I care about.  I just want them to be efficient.  The race T-shirt is actually quite spiffy.  I will wear it.  I bought a hat too.

And we were in and out.

I picked up Eric’s stuff because he was flying in with his wife later, after the expo closed.

I left his stuff at the front desk and told him we’d meet in the lobby the following morning at 4:15ish.  The shuttle buses start in Mesa and run you backwards up the course to the start.  The plan was to let the ladies drop us at the shuttle buses.

This race, as I said above, is a point to point that starts at elevation and runs back to Mesa.  It loses a couple of thousand feet but it’s not that steep and spreads it out well across the course.  It is a downhill race, but a gradual downhill, which I was looking forward to.

It starts at 6:30AM – which was great.  It’s not like you’re sleeping much the night before a race anyhow.  And were on a 2-hour time zone change – so 4:00 AM was body-clock 6:00 AM for me which is when I get up normally.

Because it started early it was nice and cool – 40-50 degrees.  Maybe that’s cold for Phoenix people but that’s firmly in the green zone for a New Englander.  The 6:30 start also meant we would be running about 45 minutes before the sun rose.  And we were running west so the sun would be behind us.

I did procure some sunscreen to put on my pasty-white winter skin.  There were drop bags, so I could stash a sweatshirt and other miscellaneous stuff.

I was surprised by the number of runners.  It was big for a regional race. But not inconveniently big.  They have plenty of space and the roads were super-wide so there was no crowding.  I got across the start without any delay and was never trapped or jammed up by traffic.

I was pretty jacked up at the start and ready to race.  I had been jacked up all week, wondering if my injuries would hold me back, wondering if my training was good, wondering how I should execute the race.

It is with such a swell of emotion and relief and enthusiasm when you find yourself standing in the corral surrounded by runners and someone starts to sing the national anthem over the loud speakers.  That’s when it all becomes real for me.

I choked up a bit when I heard the national anthem.  Tears were shed.  Not because of some overwrought nationalism but more at the emotional realization that I had done it again, gotten myself back to the starting line.

This is my place.

Months of hard work.

Here it all was.

Weeping in the dark on a mountain in Arizona with 4,000 fellow travelers.

It never fails to knock me sideways with emotion.

And we were off.  I slotted myself into the 3:50 pace group, because, my stated strategy was to stick with that pacer until I got to the higher miles and then race if I had anything left.

But, in true Chris fashion, this firm resolution lasted about 10 seconds and Eric and I pushed out at around a 8:20 -8:30 min per mile pace and left her in the dust.

I didn’t think I was being that aggressive.  The 3:50 pace group is about a 8:40 min per mile pace – so 8:20-8:30 is within 10-20 seconds and it was mostly downhill for the first 4-5 miles.

My psychopathic logic figured the downhill was worth 5-10 seconds a mile.  So I was ok.

So, in summary it didn’t seem crazy aggressive.

My heart rate was very high, like zone 5, but I can’t trust the watch HR.  I can’t trust any of those first few miles.  As I get older it takes 20 minutes for my body to warm up and the wrist-based HR measurement from my watch is suspect.  I take it as an input but mostly use other indicators.

I run by feel – perceived effort.  And it didn’t feel too bad.

Those first 4-5 miles flashed by with us talking and having fun and enjoying the morning at a good steady pace.

…

Going into the race I had some good and some bad.  Post knee injury I’ve been through so much I really have no idea what to expect. You do your best to correlate your training cycle to your race fitness, but it’s hard to tell.

Especially with how little I’m racing.  My last marathon was In march of 2024 – that’s almost a year.  What I’m noticing is that, even though I’ve run so many races in my life, I’m losing some of that tactical awareness that you get from racing a lot.  You’re just not sure how to deal with the data coming from your body.  Your interpretation just isn’t as keen.

Going into Mesa I had some good and some questionable in my training cycle.

The good was that I did get a proper training cycle with some really challenging workouts that I was quite proud of.  I also managed to get my weight down well under 170 pounds and hold it there.

This Mesa race cycle was a made-up filler race that we pivoted to after I broke my shoulder at the end of September.  I’m proud of the way I used that aborted ultra training as a springboard into this road training without hurting myself.

So – good training cycle and good healthy weight for racing.

What could have gone better?

On paper I could have used another few weeks of training.  My long runs were a 16 and an 18.  And that’s about the distance I had in me in the race.  Traditionally, I would have liked to have had a couple 20 milers in my legs or something close to that.  But at this age I’m not sure my body would have held up to another training wave.

As it was, I was feeling some injuries going into my taper.  I had a sharp pain in my heel, which at the time I didn’t know what it was.  Now I can see that it was a plantar fasciitis flare up.  I also had a weird pain in my left oblique – probably a pulled muscle.

How was the knee doing?  It was doing fine.  But, it did require me to coddle it a bit.  I did need to back off on some of the specific leg-strength workouts because it would get sore.

And this leads to, I think, my biggest miss in the cycle.  I really wanted to get core-strong for this race – but I was held back by the broken shoulder and the dodgy knee.  My core was ok, but I wasn’t as fit as I wanted to be.

Without those plyometric squats and other downhill specific exercises, I didn’t have enough quad strength for this course.

So, I was fit and healthy, and had some good quality training, but you could argue that I needed more volume, core strength and downhill running strength.

…

Because of the odd heel pain that manifested in the last week of training, I took almost the whole last week off.  Just a bit of stretching and spinning.  I had a one-day business trip earlier in the week, so I fasted on that trip, which was Tuesday and then started eating carbs when I got back.

This is a pretty good strategy.  The one day fast gave me an extra 2-3 pounds of margin so I could eat enough for the race and not worry about getting jiggly.

I had a semi-strategy to try to preload more calories than I usually do.  I historically go into marathons lighter and tried to avoid too much food in the days before the race.  This time I made a conscious effort to keep eating normally and move the needle over to the carb side.

This turned out, ironically, after all the food discipline of the last year, to cause me the most angst of anything else.  I don’t know if it was the fasting earlier in the week, the plane travel or the shift of diet towards the end, but something got stuck.  I went to bed on Friday night before the race not having pooped all day and extremely worried about the consequences.

As it turned out that situation would rectify itself Saturday morning satisfactorily and the way was cleared to race worry free.  I had no GI problems, but I spent the night imagining all sorts of distasteful scenarios.

…

OK – Back to the race.  I kept rolling out those even 8:30 splits for the first 4 ½ miles.  Then there was a hill at mile 5.  It wasn’t that steep and it was maybe a mile long, but according to the data something significant happened to me here. My pace dropped way off.  I don’t remember taking a break or anything, so I’m not sure what happened.  It seems very slow, even for a hill.  I must’ve taken a walk break to reset.

Then after the hill we got back to the slightly downhill course and I resumed knocking out those nice even splits.  This section was a blast.  I was talking with people and having fun.

There were a lot of people really focused on their paces trying to run Boston qualifiers.  I guess the race is known for that.

Somewhere in this section Eric blasted by me. He had stopped to use a porta-potty and now was racing for his time.  He was running this race to get his qualifier for 2026.  He had originally targeted the Big Bear marathon, but that got shortened to a half due to snow.

Spoiler – Eric beat his BQ time by 18 minutes at Mesa.

It was also in this section that the sun was coming up on us from behind and I noticed I was sweating.  It is very dry in Mesa so you don’t get wet with sweat, but it was dripping off my cap.

I was running with my light vest. It’s just big enough to put my phone in one side and a soft water bottle in the other and a couple of pockets for small stuff.  I started to refill the water bottle, more than once, even with the regular fluid stations on course.

I was smart enough to bring some Endurolyte pills with me, I got 2 down early and ended up taking all 8 of them.  Because it was obvious to me, I was losing a lot of water and I needed to stay on top of my electrolytes to avoid cramping.

And so it went until somewhere around mile 15.  I decided to pull off at a porta john and go pee.  When I came out of that stop, I just didn’t feel right.  As I started running again my quads were giving me a lot of negative feedback.

At that point I stopped racing and dropped into damage control.

By 18 miles I was mixing in some walking.

Doing the self-diagnostic as I was failing I could tell my legs were cooked, specifically my quads and hip flexors.  But my aerobic fitness was good.  As a matter of fact, my heart rate came right down as I slowed, I had plenty of energy and felt pretty good, my head was clear.

My legs were just shot.

Resigned to the inevitable, I pulled out my phone and dialed up a Grateful Dead show from 1972 and let it keep me company as I limped out the final 10K.  The sun was out and it was warm, but if I had the leg fitness I don’t think I would have noticed.

The course was super wide and flat in the last miles as you get into Mesa.  I pulled over to flat spot out towards the center lane and kept myself company.

The 3:50 pacer went by before I got to 20, if I remember correctly.

There’s nothing more to report.  You’ve seen this movie before.  The last 10k went by slowly. Each mile slower than the last.  Until I got to the finish. My quads were sore for a couple days.

My wife and I drove out to Joshua Tree and I went for a an easy trail run out in the rocks on the second day.  I was sore, but functional and I couldn’t pass it up.

I recovered quickly.  That tells me my training and fitness were good, I just didn’t have the leg strength and I executed poorly.

I’m proud of my training.  I’m proud of going after it and showing up at the start ready to race.  I hate being so slow.  I hate hitting the wall.

But it is what it is.

My immediate thought was to find another marathon, put in another month of speedwork and try again.

It feels more like unfinished business than progress.

But I’ve since come to a more rational conclusion.

My next adventure will be the Rim to Rim to Rim in May.  I’ll train for that.

And after that, we’ll see how I feel and if there are any more marathons in my future.

I have some ideas, but I’ve worked very hard to get out off of the BQ hamster wheel and I’m in no hurry to jump back on unless there’s a good intrinsic reason to.