This was my 2nd year of running marathon's and 2nd St. George Marathon. The last few weeks since the Nebo half were not ideal at all leading up to this race and may have contributed to my kind of falling apart the last 4 miles. It took 2 weeks for the quads to work properly after Nebo, so I wasn't running alot, other than pacing Top of Utah at 3:20, trying to do just maintenance miles while trying not to re-aggravate the quads, also dealing with a cold that moved into the lungs the week before the race. I got my normal taper miles in the week of, so that was good, and started to feel pretty decent leading up to the race. We ended up on a very late, very crammed bus and I barely had time to wait in the portopotty line and get out and in the chute before the race started. No time for warm up. And man was it warm at the start. I could tell it was going to be a scorcher. The goals for this race were, finished under 2:50, possibly run 2:45, feel like I raced the whole way. I was sort of paying attention to my heart rate this race, I felt like I could maintain around a 170 bpm and still finish okay, and that seemed to work out for most of the race. I think the final 8-9 miles I was just in survive the heat mode. I started dumping water on me at the first aid station and continued throughout the race. No matter how much water I dumped on me it would be evaporated within the next mile and would be back to too hot the mile after that. The legs felt good, though somewhat tired, and just low energy those last 8 miles. Will finish this later
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