2011 Los Angeles Marathon - Race Recap

Date: Sunday - March 20, 2011
Location: Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, CA
Start: 7:24am
Finish time: 4:26:12







I didn't take too many race day photos. I gave my camera to my sister and she took some really good photos from water station 25 but my stupid camera somehow deleted them. I doubt that I will be able to restore them so they are lost forever.

Again the race started late again. The elite women went out around 7:24am and everyone else had to wait another 17 minutes in order to give the elite women their lead time. The first three miles or so was fine. I was even starting to get a bit warm. I took off my gloves and put my rain jacket hood down. It was only lightly misting at this point. It was after those three miles that everything just went awry. It started to pour at that point for the the next 23 miles. And I mean POUR. Felt like the heavens were dumping buckets of water on us runners. Then the wind started. The wind was the worse because if you stopped to walk, you would literally freeze because you were already soaked.

I'm not a race expert but that was the worse race conditions I've ever had to run through. Made the heat from last year's Chicago Marathon seem like nothing at all.

Considering all this, I am happy with my 4:26 time. The ground was wet and slippery, the wind was blowing so fierce, I stopped to use the restroom and overall I just decided that after the rain started to come down heavy that I would stick with a conservative 10:00 minute/mile. This turned out to be a good plan.

In regards to the course, the rerouting of the course to go through Little Tokyo caused a backup around that area because there were one too many turns. I was much more familiar with the course this year since I had done it once so for obvious reasons it was much more enjoyable. I really do like this Stadium to the Sea course. It just makes the race day logistics more complicated for the runners. I'd be sad if I didn't have someone dropping me off at the start and picking me up at the finish.

I think the thing that bothered me the most about the whole rain thing was that it kept so many cheering people away. In fact, some of the water stations had only a couple of people manning them because the rain was coming down so hard that they had to seek shelter. I don't blame them, gawd it was terrible out there. This year, I am even more grateful to those who came out to cheer us on and to ALL the volunteers who braved the rain to hand us water and Gatorade. And to those random kind folks who stood in the rain handing out gummy bears and sweet buns! I thank you from the bottom of my heart!

You should all know that Sister K was a volunteer at water station 25 and was there from 7am to noon in the heavy downpour. She even paced me in from mile 25 to the finish line. Thank you Sister K for doing that for me. <3 You! And without my sweetie dropping me off at Dodger Stadium and coming to give me a sweatshirt at the finish line, I would be in bad shape. Thank you sweetie!

With that, I completed my 6th LA Marathon but I swear if the weather is like this again next year, I may have to break my streak.

So ramen does make for a good carbo loading meal. :) I swear!

Post race food - there was only packaged food products and bananas because it was raining so hard that anything else would have just been soaked and thrown out.

Sister K got me these marathon flowers. They are just gorgeous! Thank you Sister K!

Teddy loves to wear my marathon medals around and tell people that he runs marathons. 

I really like the new tracking system on the back of the race bib, B-Tag. In the past we had to wear D-tags on our shoes but I really like not having to worry about forgetting to attach the D-tag to my shoes. Love B-Tag!

I also posted some "borrowed" race photos during the race in the rain. 

Elevation: The 2011 elevation chart appears to be almost identical to last year's. The difference can be found at the first 2-3 miles.

2011 Elevation Chart

2010 Elevation Chart

This is the Landmark Chart for 2011. Looks like they took out the House of Blues (mile 16) and added Little Tokyo (mile 5).

Landmark Chart for 2010.