Preview

Last week we made it official and completed our registration for the P.F. Chang Rock 'n' Roll Marathon. Yesterday, we decided to get a better idea of what we got ourselves into by riding the course on our bikes.

Course map for marathon
from the web site:
http://arizona.competitor.com/
CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW

We drove to the light rail station at Sycamore/Main and unloaded the bikes from the car and boarded the train for downtown. The race starts near the state capitol on Jefferson Street between 15th and 13th Avenues. The closest station to the race start was Central/Washington so we had a little over a mile to bike to the start of the race.

It was interesting biking through downtown Phoenix. We've done a couple rides through the uptown area but the downtown area seems to have more historical buildings. There certainly are more government offices. With the nice weather ahead, we'll spend more time biking downtown and getting familiar with all it has to offer.

The marathon route itself is pretty easy.  It's relatively flat and has a limited number of turns.  We kept the average speed very low, around 9mph, so we could take in all the sites and register some landmarks.

The race seems to be well organized with details of the route, schedule and expectations clearly spelled out.  The 1/2 marathon starts at 8:30 with all participants expected over the start line by 9:10am. If that happens, it'll be much better than Pat's Run this past April that had us waiting nearly an hour to start.

The race has to be complete by 1 pm, four hours after the last to the participants should have started according to the schedule.  That means we have to maintain at least a 3.25 mph speed in order to complete the race within the required four hours.  If we want to finish in three hours, that average speed goes up to 4.33mph.  Hum.  Something to think about.

NOTE: The Twitter updates aren't getting posted. Technical hiccup that I'll try to get fixed soon. We are getting back into the training mode so updates should be happening more often.