Jeff Burmeister

Earlier this year I made a glorious stupid and potentially hilarious decision to run the Twin Cities Marathon the weekend prior to my 40th birthday! Yes that is right I’ve decided to go ahead and embrace my midlife crisis this year! I’m just hoping that I can get it all worked out of my system all in one day.

But of course with me being the type of person that I am, I’m won’t be running this as an “Oh lookie here everyone, I finished” type of run. No no no no, you see I have this friend named Anthony that has run several marathons in the past. And we have a healthy amount of competitive nature between us. So naturally when he hear I was thinking about running the marathon, we had a bit of a “discussion” (editor - over too many cocktails of course!) and ended up going double or nothing on a previous bet that I had won with him. So not only am I going to try to finish a full blown proper marathon (editor – while sober this time) but I’m going to be racing against a person who has several years of experience in running marathons. Oh and the best part, my goal time will put me in under the three hour and forty five minute area, which is starting to close in on a Boston Marathon qualifying time for my new age group… For my first MARATHON!! What have I done!?!?!

So to get the ball rolling towards this goal, I decided to race a couple of local events. Three weeks ago I entered the Minneapolis Recycling 5K which is run around Lake Harriet. My hope was to push my limits so I could put my results into one of those cool online run pacing calculators that they have for assisting people in their marathon strategies. The 5K was measure out exactly and USA Track certified. So I knew it would be accurate. But the weather was nasty wet, cold and very windy. So my finishing time was a bit off of my target time for this 5k. But considering that I don’t train for running and it was in nasty weather, I’m pretty happy. In fact I was able to set a new personal record (editor - Not hard to do considering it was his third 5k event ever!) of 22 minutes and 30 seconds. Which is two minutes and fifteen seconds faster then my finishing time in this event last year.

I then hooked up with a co-work named Michael who is one heck of a good runner for some training runs around our neighborhood. Our first race together was on an early Saturday morning following the 5k. We were off to do three hours of tempo work together. This turned out to be a pretty good time, and my body handled the pounding pretty well. We spent a lot of time talking about training and various events coming up. So after the eighteen miles with Michael, I figured it might be time to take it to the next level and see what my body could really take. But a half Marathon the next week?! Yeap, that is exactly what I did next.

The Wellsfargo Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon was race from Wayzata around the west side of Lake Minnetonka down to Excelsior. The 13.2 mile course wound up and down the hills around the lake and through some of the most prestigious neighborhoods in Minnesota. Luck was on our side that morning, as the weather turned out to be beautiful for the event with 50 degree weather, only a little wind and mostly sunny conditions. I doubly lucky to get a last second entry into the sold out race from one of Michael’s friends that wasn’t able to attend. So for that day I was to be known as Jamie, who was the original registration holder.

The course turned out to be much more hilly then I originally expected, and I was hurting right away in the race. Michael was feeling strong but kept to his promise to run with me. After miles and miles of watching Michael hit the hills hard and pull away from me only to slow down at the top and wait I started to tell him to go on without me as I was having some troubles holding my heart rate to a steady level with the hills. But again he kept to his promise and kept running with me and encouraging me and setting a good tempo as we went along. Then between mile markers 9 and 10 on a very steep hill, I waved him on and this time he went. The last 3 plus miles were up to me to hold my pace and keep to my goal. I started to play math games in my head to keep my brain focused off the pain I was putting myself through.

When I finally hit the 12 mile marker, I was a full two minutes ahead of my goal time, and I was feeling strong enough to try and kick with two other guys who looked like they would have strong finishes. We took our pace up too and probably beyond what I could hold. With about 100 meters to the finish I cracked under the pace they were setting and they pulled away from me. But the damage was done as we past about thirty people in that last mile. My finishing time was a very respectable 1:42:02. a full three minutes faster then my goal time. That is an average pace of 7:51 / mile. I finished 191st out of 1750 people, and I was 50th out of 290 in my age group. Not too bad for a first half marathon I think.