“This was the most painful marathon I have run yet,” he wrote Wednesday in an e-mail. “It hurt bad. It was tough because I had a guy sitting on me for the last seven miles so I had to stay positive and not give in to the temptation to just settle for where I was. By the last mile I was just telling myself to drive forward with everything I had.”
Hall held off Tekeste Kebede of Ethiopia for third place, finishing in 2:09:40, nine seconds ahead of Kebede, but more than three minutes off his personal best. Hall walked away wearily from Boston, but he feels he ran a good race considering the conditions.
“I was very happy with the [Boston] race,” wrote Hall, who has completed five marathons since his April 2007 debut at the London Marathon. “Coming off the Olympics I needed this to remember what the marathon feels like and to get some confidence back. I am already really excited for the fall. I am going to run harder and smarter and take another swing. I will win a major marathon, it is just a matter of when.”
Hall’s coach Terrence Mahon echoed his runner’s post-race assessment.“I think he ran a great run,” Mahon said by phone Monday. “To expect that he will come and win right off the bat is not impossible, but that’s not the only scenario for a great run.”Hall created visions of victory early in the race when he floated down the opening declines in a brisk 4:38 first mile and a 14:33 5K. His moved defied traditional Boston Marathon tactics of easing into the race in the opening few miles.
“I just wanted to make it a true marathon race,” he wrote. “I wanted to run my own effort and be the one dictating the race early on. I think I might have been a little too aggressive considering the wind but having never raced the course made it difficult to know how to run the first half.” The brisk headwind forced Hall to retreat at the 10K mark and settle uneasily into the pack of about a dozen lead runners. “After leading for half an hour I was getting sick of the wind and decided to sit,” he wrote. “Whenever I got out of the lead the pace slowed. I knew when I decided to sit the time would pretty much go out the window. Our pace was all over the map after I got out of the lead. It was like doing a Fartlek run. The fact that the wind was against us the entire way really made it difficult to run fast. No one wanted to be in the lead for long, which lead to crazy pace changing.”
Mahon had hoped Hall would avoid surging to help conserve energy for the end of the race by dictating the pace for a longer period of time. “You have a certain effort to dial into so you can have some left in the last 10 minutes,” said Mahon. “When you start doing a lot surging, you spend fuel at high rates and it does not always go back to normal when you slow down. It’s more comfortable when you run even the whole way.”Hall, a pre race favorite, did not allow not winning dampen his Boston experience, which included throwing out the first pitch at a Red Sox game on Saturday. “To be in Boston on marathon weekend is my weekend in the sun,” he wrote. “The crowd was amazing out there. I have never experienced anything like it. They were going crazy for me. I get the chills to think about what it would be like to be really on when running in Boston. Something out of the ordinary could happen.”
Hall is considering a fall marathon, likely New York or Chicago. He also hopes to break four minutes in the mile this summer and plans to pace workouts for his wife Sara, an elite middle distance runner. And, he says he wants to run another Boston Marathon.
Thanks to Universalsports for this article!
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