Sorry to keep you guys waiting.  To my surprise, I found another way to screw up one of these things.

The weather was perfect, 54 degrees at the start and dry.  I started out running a few seconds slower than race pace early on and felt pretty good.  Actually hit the half in 1:59, which was a little slow, but thought I could pick up the pace in the second half and run a 1:56 coming in to hit my goal.

The bad news is cramps hit at about mile 16 and it got ugly.  I never actually stopped running, but the pace slowed considerably and all my plans went up in smoke. 

In thinking about what went wrong, lack of sodium probably got me.  I carb loaded on Friday and drank a ton of water, my guess is I flushed most of the sodium out of my system without realizing it.

Anyway, I'm disappointed, but not discouraged.  All the work I did to get ready has left me really fit and I'm going to take advantage of it by running a couple of shorter races soon.

Sorry to be the bearer of lousy news, I mentioned tapering and getting it right gives me trouble didn't I...? lol  I managed to do it again...lol

Dark Horse, that's funny you went searching for a dead guy...lol  The people at the med tent actually grabbed me after I crossed the finish line and led me to their tent.  I asked one of the women, "Do I really look that bad?"  She said, "I figure you've probably looked better." lol

They took my blood pressure, 122 / 72 and pulse, 62, then let me go. 

I'm choosing my words carefully because a lot of people run marathons really well and there are new runners in here who I don't want to discourage because of what happened to me.

I REALLY don't know why I had a bad day, I'm just guessing it was sodium, but don't know for sure. I thought my training would pull me through the rough spots, but it didn't happen.

And I'm swearing off marathons for a while, but think I'll give my running log to my "coach" to see if he can figure out what I did wrong.