# Race Report - Irving Marathon For being so close to Dallas, this race was a bit smaller than I thought it'd be, smaller than both of my Austin races in the previous two months. It still had more than a thousand runners so it was far from my smallest races either. This area of Irving had a San Antonio feel with its riverwalk (around a lake in this case) and canals with shops—though they weren't nearly as active as San Antonio shops, much to my girlfriend's disappointment—and the course took us through all of it. It was a very walkable area with districts of shopping and food. If the temperatures didn't dip so low, we would have tried out some of the lake activities the day prior to the race. I'm writing this after the race and can't seem to find the elevation profile for this course map. They've already modified their site to promote their next race in May: the Fiesta De Mayo Half Marathon. I'll have to grab that sort of info before my races in the future. Anyway, this course was pretty flat. It had minor hills here and there, but most of the elevation change came from swapping back and forth from the road to the boardwalk on the lake. My prep for this wasn't great. I incremented my mileage up too slowly, leaving myself no time to taper; I only had a few days of rest between my longest run and the race—not good. Both of my longest runs were between 14-14.5 miles, which was also not good. The race felt great though. After that initial tightness and soreness wore off in the first several miles, I was cruising. I swapped to the run/walk method from miles 22-25, but other than that, I ran the whole thing. This was a beautiful race, but again, the goal wasn't to compete, just to survive. I'm hoping to change that a bit in the next one as I've got a solid training block of 21 weeks (1.5 weeks in already) leading up to it. Stay tuned! ![[202603irvingmedal.jpg]]