Chasing the PR: Columbus Marathon 2026

Two years after my first Columbus Marathon, and one year after an ankle injury and a downpour wrecked my shot at the PR, I went back out this past Sunday to try again. Short version: I missed it, by about a minute, officially. Longer version is worth telling, because the data tells a more interesting story than the result does.

Race morning was cold, a freeze watch was in effect and it was still in the 30s at the start, clear and calm. I’d planned a conservative first 10 miles, settling into goal pace through 20, and saving anything extra for the final 10K. For the first 10K or so, that’s almost exactly what happened: 8:50, then high 8:50s, right where I wanted to be.

Around mile 4, someone ahead of me collapsed. I slowed down and then sped up for a stretch to flag down a police officer, which is the reason mile 6 is the one odd split in an otherwise steady morning. I hope they’re okay.

From there, the race got away from my plan a little, in a good-problem kind of way. I felt strong, and miles 7 through 18 crept progressively faster than I’d intended, 8:38s and 8:40s drifting into a string of 8:09s, 8:14s, and 8:15s. It felt sustainable in the moment. My heart rate told a different story, climbing steadily from the mid-140s early on to the high 160s by mile 16, the classic sign of a body working harder and harder to hold a pace that wasn’t actually getting any faster.

Mile 15 is also where my quads and hip flexors started hurting, the same pattern that’s derailed my last few marathons, and the same mile range I’d been specifically trying to protect in training. I kept pushing anyway. The pain actually eased up by mile 18 or 19, but what replaced it was new: my left calf cramped hard when it stretched out, then my right calf followed, and the last 6 to 7 miles were a fight against on-and-off cramping I hadn’t dealt with in any of my training runs. Current thinking on exercise cramps points less at dehydration or electrolytes and more at plain neuromuscular fatigue, your muscles working harder than they’re conditioned for until the signal to relax them stops arriving cleanly. Given how much faster I’d run through the middle miles than I’d ever held in training, that tracks.

I still managed to close it out, actually sprinting the final stretch at something close to an 8-minute pace with my heart rate at its highest point of the whole race. Official time: 3:48:25, an 8:43 average pace, good for 189th in my age group and top 28% overall out of nearly 4,600 finishers. My watch, which almost always reads a little long over 26.2 miles because it’s nearly impossible to hit every tangent perfectly, actually showed a new PR by 47 seconds. The watch is wrong on this one. The timing mat is what counts, and by that measure I came up 73 seconds short of my 2023 time of 3:47:12.

Here’s the real takeaway, and it’s a specific one: the discipline I’d planned for the final 10K actually needed to start much earlier, around mile 7, not mile 20. I didn’t blow up the way I did in the two marathons before this one, no cratering pace, no walking, which tells me the training and the fueling plan genuinely worked. What got me instead was quietly spending too much too early, a mile here and a mile there, well before I’d earned the right to. Next time, the goal isn’t just a faster number. It’s holding the exact same pace from mile 7 to mile 20 that I held in the first 10K, and only then finding out what’s actually left.

(Splits and mile numbers above are from my watch’s lap data; the finish time and placement are from the official results.)

You can see this race, and every run before it, on the same running dashboard I built earlier this year.