The Paris Marathon 2009: From the Start to Mile 1
On the day of the race I got up at 5:30am. I got dressed in my marathon clothes and went down for breakfast. As usual I had two slices of toast with jam, with some luminous looking bright green apple juice.
Once I’d eaten, I returned to my room to put on the rest of my clobber: A waist pack for carrying energy gels, an arm wallet for carrying my MP3 player (just in case I needed some musical motivation) and my race number and timing chip.
I just had enough time to do some extra stretches before I met with the other runners in my group in the hotel lobby at 7:30am. Waiting in the lobby left a few minutes to chat to the other runners. Most of the runners I talked to were marathon newbies, some had run half-marathons before whilst others had only started running two months ago – and now they were attempting a marathon! Once everyone was assembled, the guides led us out of the hotel through a subway and then we all walked down the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
A few metres before the Arc de Triomphe, where the race pens were, the guides gave us our final instructions to leave any bags in the baggage area at the finish on Avenue Foch and then to make our way to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, where all the start pens were.
Now I had registered in the pink time zone of runners who expected to finish in a time of 4h30m. However, I have said before that I would be trying for 5h30m again this time. The only reason I registered in the pink zone was because that was the slowest group offered when I registered originally. So I stayed at the back of the pink zone, planning to fall back as soon as possible to my own 12m per mile pace, which would lead to a time in the region of 5h30m.
In the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, I recorded my first “piece to camera”…
Start line update
At about 8:45 French time, the announcer kicked off the 2009 Paris Marathon with a very fast countdown. I discarded my plastic vest, but soon wished I hadn’t, as I would be waiting another fifteen minutes before I would be able to jog over the start line. Just walking up to the start was a tricky business – the road was covered with the plastic vests, discarded clothes and walking down the left edge of the road, where the crowd was less dense, there were hundreds of discarded half-empty bottles of water.
Walking up to the start line of the Paris Marathon 2009 - another ten minutes to go from here! (View full size version)
Even though the crowd was tightly packed, it started to thin out a little as people got to the start, as everyone wanted to jog over the start line rather than walk over it. Eventually I crossed the start line at about 8:57am (French time) and started my Paris Marathon attempt.
Right from the beginning my plan was to run at a steady 12-minute per mile pace. Fortunately for me, the Paris Marathon employs runners to act as pacemakers. Their sole aim is to run the race in a certain time. So, as I ran down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, I kept on looking behind me for each pacemakers’ trademark flag. I felt like I couldn’t settle down into a good rhythm until I found the pacemaker – and when I passed the first kilometre marker I knew I had to slow down a lot more and that my pace was too fast.
Seeing that kilometre marker also got me worried about how the distance would be counted – France, of course, uses the metric system, where a marathon is 42.195km, not 26.2m. If the distance was only marked in kilometres, I would have to do some pretty quick mental arithmetic to work out when I’d passed each mile. Not something I wanted to do whilst running a marathon.
Finally the flag of one of the pacemakers appeared, but to my surprise it was the 5h00 pacemaker. So I had to slow down even more until the 5h30 pacemaker passed me. At the end of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the route turned left, crossing the Place de la Concorde, then making it’s way down the Rue de Rivoli. I didn’t actually see much of the Place de la Concorde because I was on the outside of the pack of runners, so I couldn’t see much over the top of them. Then the course continued down the Rue de Rivoli. It was whilst running (slowly!) down here that I finally “caught up” with the 5h30 pacemaker group. I stayed with this group for the rest of the race.
Now that I was following a pacemaker, I didn’t need to worry about kilometres vs miles, because all I needed to do was just keep pace with the pacemaker. I was surprised just how far back the group was at the beginning, but it just goes to show how much of a mistake I could have made by getting caught in the moment at the start and by continuing at that starting pace. With hindsight I understand now that the strategy of the pacemaker was a classic “negative split” – that is, by running deliberately slower than your race pace in the first half of the race, then speeding up in the second half, you can run the distance much more “comfortably” – though that’s not a word I use often when talking about running a marathon.